Semi-Daily Journal Archive: 2006-11-19

Friday, November 24, 2006

Duncan Black Is a National Treasure

Duncan Black, national treasure, performs the service of providing us with:

Eschaton: Simple Answers to Simple Questions

Hilzoy asks:

I just have to ask: is there anything this administration does competently?

No.

This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

In a world run with even a smidgeon of rationality, George W. Bush would have been impeached long ago.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Federal Reserve Independence

There are more Republicans angry at Alan Greenspan for not paying due respect to the political fortunes of George H.W. Bush and for not disrupting Clinton's deficit-reduction agenda than there are Democrats mad at Alan Greenspan for failing to publicly oppose George W. Bush's tax cuts. Nobody thinks that Paul Volcker trimmed Fed policy to serve anybody's political interest. And William McChesney Martin did quite a good job of resisting political pressures.

It's always seemed to me that this episode tells us much more about Nixon (and quite possibly Burns) than about the structure of relationships between the Fed and the White House:

Fedgate | Free exchange | Economist.com: "Just kick 'em in the rump a little." One cannot imagine Ben Bernanke, in his tan socks, resorting to such measures in today's Federal Reserve meetings. But a bit of rump-kicking is exactly what Richard Nixon told the supposedly independent Fed chairman, Arthur Burns, to do in December 1971, according to recently released recordings from the Nixon tapes.

Burton Abrams, an economist at the University of Delaware, writes about the tapes in the latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.... In December 1971, Nixon was less than a year from re-election. Unemployment had risen to 6% from less than 4% a couple of years earlier. Nixon blamed just such a soft patch (rather than the famous sweaty patch on his chin during the TV debates) for his defeat to JFK in 1960, and he wanted the Fed to do everything it could to avoid a repeat.... Sad to say, Burns, it appears from these recordings, did rather a lot to oblige.

At the December meeting, for example, the Fed opted for a more expansionary monetary policy, even after a cut in rates announced a few days before. Burns's footprints are evident in the minutes of their discussions. The President of the Kansas City Fed, for example, voted for the policy "reluctantly"; another board member supported it with "considerable reluctance"; the President of the New York Fed noted his surprise at the cut announced four days earlier, and urged "great caution" before allowing still "greater monetary ease". That caution turned out to be justified....

Nixon could be a persuasive man. He told Shultz in a taped Oval office meeting that "war is going to be declared if he [Burns] doesn't come around some." The skirmishes that did take place were covert and dirty. Mr Abrams cites the memoir of Nixon's speechwriter [William Safire], who claims the administration sought to undermine Burns by planting false stories about him in the press. Burns, they said, had asked for a big pay rise at a time when the rest of the country was labouring under income controls. In fact, Burns had offered to take a pay cut....

"I know there's the myth of the autonomous Fed," Nixon is quoted as saying in the book Witness to Power.

Essential Thanksgiving Movie

Just as "The Nightmare Before Christmas" has become the essential Halloween movie, so "Addams Family Values'--for its"Pilgrim Pageant" sequence--has become the essential Thanksgiving movie.

Essential Reading on the Bushies: Mark Danner in NYRB

Mark Danner on the Bushies:

TomDispatch - Tomgram: Mark Danner, How a War of Unbound Fantasies Happened: Consider, for example, these words of Donald H. Rumsfeld... the day after President Bush fired him:

It is very clear that the major combat operations were an enormous success. It's clear that in Phase Two of this, it has not been going well enough or fast enough.

Such analyses are not uncommon from Pentagon civilians; thus Dov Zakheim, a former Rumsfeld aide, to a television interviewer later that evening:

People will debate the second part, the second phase of what happened in Iraq. Very few are arguing that the military victory in the first phase was anything but an outright success.

Three years and eight months after the Iraq war began, the secretary of defense and his allies see in Iraq not one war but two. One is the Real Iraq War -- the "outright success" that only very few would deny, the war in which American forces were "greeted as liberators"... and then... what? Well, whatever we are in now: a Phase Two, a "postwar phase" (as Bob Woodward sometimes calls it) which has lasted three and a half years and continues. In the first, successful, Real Iraq War, 140 Americans died. In the postwar phase 2,700 Americans have died -- and counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in fact a war at all but a phase, a non-war, something unnamed, unconceptualized --unplanned.

Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war... must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn.

In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power -- enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world.... [Ron] Suskind... in The One Percent Doctrine... in spring 2002....

The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to make an example of Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.

In the great, multicolored braid of reasons and justifications leading to the Iraq war one might call this "the realist strand," and though the shape of the reasoning might seem to Gerson to stand as far from "democracy building" and "ending tyranny" as "power politics" does from "idealism," the distance is wholly illusory, dependent on an ideological clarity that was never present. In fact, the two chains of reasoning looped and intersected, leading inexorably to a common desire for a particular action -- confronting Saddam Hussein and Iraq -- that had been the subject of the administration's first National Security Council meeting, in January 2001, and that had been pushed to the fore again by Defense Department officials in the first "war cabinet" meeting after the September 11 attacks...

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Shaken-Not-Stirred Blogging...

Last night I got to page 186 of:

Charles Stross (2006), The Jennifer Morgue (Golden Gryphon Press: 1930846452).

I'm enjoying it immensely. Of course, I am its target demographic: somebody who knows too much about H.P. Lovecraft, too much about computers, too much about Ian Fleming, and too much about James Bond movies. All I lack is a Rhetoric Department's professors knowledge of narrative form and love of semiotics. But how large can this target demographic be?

Just before I went to bed I had a "bing" go off. if the Charlie-Stross-emulation-program running on my personal wetware is any good, the real boss supervillain is [spoiler] Fluffy [/spoiler].

And Virginia Postrel says:

Dynamist Blog: The Lost Meaning of Casino Royale: James Bond is a glamorous icon, but we don't notice some of his original glamour today, because we've forgotten what a constrained world his early audience inhabited. Simon Winder explains in his engaging new book, The Man Who Saved Britain:

Casino Royale is a book all about privilege, but privilege of a very marginal and almost grimy kind, and it shows the reality of British life with startlingly greater clarity than the Coronation. The action is entirely based in and around the dull, failing Normandy coastal town of Royale--a sort of hopeless Deauville. One can imagine that French casinos circa 1950 had been through rather a lot--the previous decade having seen a "mixed crowd" at the tables. The nature of Bond's privilege is to be at Royale at all. Currency and travel restrictions meant that the Channel, the barrier essential in 1940 to keeping the Germans out, was now quite actively penning non-military British people in. The very wealthy, or those with friends in France, could make arrangements to get round the restrictions (which stayed in place in various ways until the 1970s--yet another example of how strange the recent past was), but for virtually everyone France, even blustery, sour northern France, had become as exotic as Shangri-La. Fleming could not have chosen his location more cleverly: he would need to ratchet up the flow of exotica with each of the later books (until by the end Bond is mucking around with Japanese lobster eaten live as it crawls around his table), but Britain's frame of reference had shrunk so small by the early fifties that Royale was quite enough.

The book teems with now almost invisible digs--indeed the whole idea of the casino with its theoretically limitless stakes and winnings must have seemed derangedly heady to the book's first readers. And the Anglo-American relationship has never been better summed up than when Felix Leiter hands a broke Bond an envelope crammed with lovely new dollars, allowing him to carry on playing cards with the villain, Le Chiffre. For me the heart of the book, though, must be the scene when Bond tucks into an avocado pear. An avocado! These were exotic in 1939 but they could at least be bought. Avocados only really became available again in Britain in the late 1950s and had a desirability status akin to that felt (rather more democratically) for bananas by East Germans. The sense of the exotic which Fleming had to work for really hard in later books is won here with a mere oily tropical fruit on the windswept Channel coast. Oddly, during one of the many horrible, diarrhoeic currency crises that ravaged the international value of the pound (this one in the late sixties), avocados were specifically mentioned (along with strawberries and vintage wine) as imports to be restricted under the draconian "Operation Brutus," mercifully never implemented.

The 21st-century world of the movie is still dangerous, but far less suffocating. I recommend Winder's book: to both Bond fans (some of whom will find in infuriating) and anyone interested in the mentality of postwar Britain.

Is Neil King Being Naive or Vicious? We Report, You Decide

Neil King of the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reports:

Potential Deputies to Rice: No Thanks: Secretary of State Rice continues to struggle to find anyone to replace Robert Zoellick as her deputy, leaving many to wonder why an otherwise plum job offers so little attraction. Zoellick, who is now at Goldman Sachs, left the department in July, and Rice has since approached at least four candidates to take the post; all have turned her down, according to several knowledgeable sources. Among those who have said no are Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt and Gen. James Jones, former Marine Corps commander and now head the United States European Command. Rice is said to have asked Gen. Jones twice to take the job.

There is now talk that Rice is reaching out to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, with some suggesting that the offer has been sweetened with a promise to give Negroponte the top job should Rice leave the State Department before the end of the administration. Some Republicans still think Rice may decide to seek elected office--even the presidency in 2008--despite her many protestations to the contrary.

--Neil King Jr.

Do many really wonder why nobody wants to be Condi Rice's deputy? Or do people already know?

What To Do

Stefan Geens discovers the Pony Principle, and applies it to Roger Altman and Alan Blinder, who he says labor in vain.

I agree that Altman and Blinder labor in vain, but I join them. They have good ideas.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will!

RGE - Altman and Blinder: Can't we all just get along?: Writing in the WSJ today, Roger Altman and Alan Blinder engage in admirable but wishful thinking about what Congress could do to repair the US economy in the next few years.

They propose a bipartisan effort to raise the minimum wage, boost the Earned Income Tax Credit, move towards universal health insurance, fix social security, reduce the US' dependence on oil and gas, provide better education and training, and also bring back pay-as-you-go financing.

Would you like a pony with that?

We fully realize that only a few of these policies can be promulgated right now. But a year hence, the policy window will have closed tight and the (presidential) political window will be wide open. So time is short. After watching the recent election results, we'd hate to be an empty-handed politician facing the voters in 2008.

Here's what's more likely to happen, unfortunately: Free trade will suffer, dismantled by populist politicians who think international trade is a mercantilist proposition. And the political window may already be closing, as the race for the White House starts earlier than ever.

The Economic Front - WSJ.com: [I]n recent decades the fruits of economic growth have not been widely shared, and we Americans have been growing apart. Notably, the middle class has fallen much further behind the rich; and recently, real wages have lagged behind productivity while profits have soared.... The problem is both deep-seated and longstanding... there is no magic bullet.... But a few obvious steps would help.

For starters, the Democrats have pledged to raise the federal minimum wage, which is now at its lowest (relative to other wages or prices) in a half-century. Making the Earned Income Tax Credit more generous would also help.

Beyond that, our government needs to repair and thicken the badly tattered safety net for the middle class. Tens of millions of Americans live in fear that a major health problem could reduce them to penury.... Health insurance poses complex problems that will not be solved easily or cheaply. But it is well past time that we started moving judiciously toward universal health insurance. Covering all children is a sensible first step.

Retirement security is another worry of the non-rich majority.... Fixing Social Security is not that difficult with a little bipartisanship and a dose of goodwill -- two more things the voters want. That said, all realistic solutions involve moderating benefit growth and/or raising more revenue.... The federal budget deficit, the negative personal saving rate, and our massive borrowing from abroad are all evidence that America is focused too much on the present and not enough on the future. We need a multidimensional investment strategy to change that orientation.

Two of the top priorities should be equipping our work force to cope better with the rapidly globalizing economy, and reducing our dependence on oil and gas. The first requires more and better education and training. The second requires a greater commitment to research on alternative energy technologies, plus serious conservation measures by consumers and industry....

[M]aking hard choices is what grown-ups do, and the voters were telling the politicians to grow up.

The federal budget deficit is a concrete example.... With the baby boom generation about to retire, the budget should be in surplus. But instead, we face cumulative 10-year deficits of $3.5 trillion -- and worse after that. You can blame this sorry state of affairs on either excessive tax-cutting or on profligate spending -- take your pick. It's more accurate to blame both, because fiscal discipline has utterly broken down.... Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi has promised to restore pay-as-you-go financing -- a bipartisan set of budget rules that were originally adopted under the first President Bush, but then brushed aside under his son. Unfortunately, when paygo went, so did any pretense of fiscal discipline. A coincidence? We think not. The new Congress should bring back paygo immediately.

Americans Figure Out There Are Two George Bushes

Wonkette is becoming a national treasure:

Now They Figure Out There Are Two George Bushes: It’s always mentioned in pollster code because nobody wants to come right out and say... but the cold truth is that George W. Bush’s “name recognition” was always due to “false returns” based on “considerable voter confusion” and “composite imaging.” In other words, most people who voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 primaries thought they were voting for his father.

It only took six years, but many Americans now seem to understand it was the old President Bush’s numbskull son who became president in 2000. And guess what? They don’t like the son, not at all...

Econ 101b: Fall 2006: November 21: Unemployment and the NAIRU

Background readings:

Douglas Staiger, James H. Stock, Mark W. Watson (2001), "Prices, Wages and the U.S. NAIRU in the 1990s" http://nber.org/papers/w8320.
Douglas Staiger, James H. Stock, Mark W. Watson (1996), "How Precise are Estimates of the Natural Rate of Unemployment?" http://nber.org/papers/w5477.
Gayle Allard, Peter H. Lindert (2006), "Euro-Productivity and Euro-Jobs since the 1960s: Which Institutions Really Mattered?" http://nber.org/papers/w12460.
Olivier Blanchard (1998), "Revisiting European Unemployment: Unemployment, Capital Accumulation, and Factor Prices" http://nber.org/papers/w6566.

Econ 210a: Fall 2006: Memo Question for November 29--Spread of Industrialization

MEMO QUESTION FOR NOVEMBER 29 Is the pace of advance and the pace of the spread of industrialization in the nineteenth century best characterized as "fast" or "slow"? Why?

Monday, November 20, 2006

Never Fire Your Best Polemicist If Your Dork Quotient Is More than 30%

And now we have another one: If the dork quotient of your magazine is more than 30%, never, ever, ever, fire your best polemicist:

Anderson watches the unleashed Spencer Ackerman in action. It is a thing of beauty, in its own way:

Thus Blogged Anderson.: Beware of firing your polemicist: The New Republic's decision to fire Spencer Ackerman cannot possibly have done anything positive for their subscription numbers. Besides which, if you thought Paul O'Neill talked bad about his former boss, you ain't seen nothin' yet:

Among the most annoying of TNR tropes is the flight to meta-analysis as soon as the recognition dawns that the magazine can't win an argument. And here, it pains and saddens me to say, TNR embraces it like a security blanket. First, TNR concedes that nothing it can possibly desire is likely to occur: "The U.S. presence in Iraq will not last long. Perhaps this new political reality will serve as shock therapy, scaring Iraq's warring factions into negotiations that can prevent the worst sectarian warfare. But perhaps not." The "perhaps not" is an intellectual prophylactic: it changes the subject before one can ask what in the world the U.S. could tell the Sunnis and the Shiites that could make them believe that that their interests are better served by peace than by war. If TNR has any idea what it means by this, it has an obligation to say so. But -- and, my friends, I can tell you, because I went to those Thursday editorial meetings for years -- these people have no idea what they mean....

Then, finally, comes the coup de grace. Now that TNR has dispensed with its empty attempt to discuss what ought to be done about Iraq, it comes to the real question:

[A]s we pore over the lessons of this misadventure, we do not conclude that our past misjudgments warrant a rush into the cold arms of "realism." Realism, yes; but not "realism." American power may not be capable of transforming ancient cultures or deep hatreds, but that fact does not absolve us of the duty to conduct a foreign policy that takes its moral obligations seriously. As we attempt to undo the damage from a war that we never should have started, our moral obligations will not vanish, and neither will our strategic needs.

Please believe me when I say that this makes me want to cry.... This is the emptiest of evasions -- a fetishization of "seriousness" without ever actually being serious. In one of my last pieces for them, I wrote that "Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not 'Were we wrong?' but 'Why were we wrong?' and 'How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?'" I begged TNR during my time there to address these last questions. But now it's dawned on me that my former friends never will.

Ouch.

Anderson does not see Spencer Ackerman's reaction to Frank Foer's turning TNR into a clipping service for the Weekly Standard

toohotfortnr: Hey, Frank, great editing, buddy. You really are a credit to the magazine, and I'm a total dick. Here's what you let Bob Kagan write for you this week:

Some claim that we don't have 50,000 troops to send to Iraq. In fact, the troops are available. Sending additional forces to Iraq means lengthening troop rotations, as the United States has done in previous major conflicts. Sustaining such an increased deployment, however, will require a substantial increase in the overall size of the Army and Marines. This increase, which does not require a draft but does require money, is necessary regardless of what we do in Iraq. It is stunning that this administration has attempted to fight two wars and has envisioned other possible interventions with a force clearly inadequate for these global commitments.

And here's what he wrote with Bill Kristol this very week:

Those who claim that it is impossible to send 50,000 more troops to Iraq, because the troops don't exist, are wrong. The troops do exist. But it is also true that the Army and Marines are stretched, and that this new deployment needs to be accompanied by rapid steps to increase the overall size of American ground forces. For six years, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused to acknowledge that his vision of the American military of the future did not match the present reality of American military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world. We trust the new secretary of defense will understand the necessity of dealing urgently with the manpower crisis in our military.

Hey, I didn't know you wanted to turn TNR into a Weekly Standard clip service. You're totally up there with Kinsley and Hertzberg!

Ouch.

Anderson does not see Spencer Ackerman's reaction to Marty Peretz:

toohotfortnr: civilized man, you were keeper to me -- now your animal is free, and you're free to die: Marty [Peretz] writes:

Even the bare rudiments of civilization will not soon come back to the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

That's exactly right. The Iraqi civil war will be fought with rocks and sticks. Imagine the danger if they realized how to harness fire! Lucky for us that the savages have not learned how to use the wheel...

Ouch.

Or to Leon Wieseltier:

toohotfortnr: bow down, bow down -- God will infest you with maggots, my son: Oh, Leon! Why? You studied under Sir Isaiah! How could you ever, ever, write this line:

For three-and-a-half years, the Iraqis have been a free people.

You knew him and I didn't. But I daresay Isaiah Berlin would have upbraided you for saying this. No, my friend, chaos is not freedom, the Iraqis were never free, and as Becker and Fagan put it, only a fool would say that.

Ouch.

Jackie Calmes Exhbits a Tinge of Optimistic Naivete

The highly-intelligent but, it appears, slightly naive Jackie Calmes has hopes for bipartisan action in the next two years. George W. Bush, she believes, has every incentive to act like a rational human being in the circumstances in which he finds himself--and that means striking deals with the Democrats that are in the national interest.

The flaw in Jackie's reasoning is obvious: when has Bush every acted like a rational human being?

Campaign Journal - WSJ.com: Pledges of Bipartisan Action

In Congress Look Shaky: WASHINGTON -- In the days since the midterm election, the signs haven't been encouraging for the bipartisan cooperation that both President Bush and Congress's incoming Democratic leaders initially promised for the coming two years. A couple of factors do keep alive some expectations for joint action. President Bush wants to burnish a legacy that otherwise seems destined to be defined by the misadventures in Iraq. And congressional Democrats want to rack up some achievements, both to deliver on their few and mostly unambitious campaign promises, and to show voters they can govern ahead of the 2008 election. Among the possibilities: a federal minimum-wage increase, renewed budget limits, a rewrite of immigration policy, and lobbying reforms.

But even that much will be a big challenge, judging by the post-election maneuvering.... First, the president. Folks in both parties have been looking for signals of whether Mr. Bush will continue to seek his way or no way -- or whether he'll accept voters' rebuke and dust off the more conciliatory governing style of his days as Texas governor. So far, both sides see the old Bush at work. With Republicans still in charge for a lame duck Congress -- Democrats officially take over in January -- Mr. Bush has pushed several issues that Democrats are interpreting as an outstretched hand alright, but "a clear slap in the face," as Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York put it in one instance. The president is again asking the Senate to confirm John Bolton as United Nations ambassador and five controversial conservatives as federal judges, all of whom saw their initial nominations blocked. He is demanding passage of the bill authorizing warrantless electronic surveillance. He renominated the chairman of the agency for U.S. overseas broadcasting, despite a government report alleging misuse of public funds. And he has chosen as a federal overseer of family-planning grants a man hostile to distribution of contraceptives.

Mr. Bush says he will try again to overhaul Social Security, though even with his party in control of Congress, he couldn't get to first base. For any hope of success with Democrats, he would first have to set aside his idea of carving private accounts from Social Security. Then he could call the Democrats' bluff, challenging them to make good on their stated willingness to restore the existing program's long-term solvency. If the two sides then could agree on cost-saving tweaks to Social Security's benefits and tax formulas that both sides know must be made eventually, that would be a huge achievement. It would be one that the George Bush who governed Texas would gladly take for his legacy -- but probably not the George Bush who as president for six years has played to the social and economic conservatives of his party's base.

As for the Democrats, Speaker-apparent Nancy Pelosi's... intervening -- aggressively and ultimately unsuccessfully -- to get House Democrats to elect her ally Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha as the second-ranking Majority Leader.... Mrs. Pelosi mainly acted out of personal loyalty to Mr. Murtha.... But another motivation... was... her desire to elevate Congress' harshest critic of the president and his Iraq policies as House Democratic leader.

Then there are the congressional Republicans. Already they are telegraphing that, once officially in Congress' minority, they will feel little responsibility to help Democrats succeed -- or the president, should he reach some bipartisan deals with the other party. Interviews with House Republicans in town for the lame-duck session elicited nothing short of fury with Mr. Bush for waiting until after the election to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the lightning rod for many voters' dismay with the Iraq war. And the president and his strategist Karl Rove only stoked these Republicans' anger by their suggestions that, more than Iraq, it was corruption in the Republicans' own ranks that cost them their congressional majorities. Even Republicans who accept the corruption rap are angry at this perceived buck-passing by the men in the White House.

Such pique wasn't the cause but certainly was a factor when a significant number of House Republicans helped block approval of a trade pact with Vietnam -- even as Mr. Bush was winging his way to that country in hopes of celebrating the agreement. In the Senate, meanwhile, Republicans narrowly resurrected as their No. 2 leader Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, who openly blames the president and Mr. Rove for engineering his ouster as majority leader two years ago in favor of the hapless and now-retiring Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee. In House Republicans' elections for their leaders in the coming Congress, a common theme was struck by Texas Rep. Kay Granger after her election last week to a lower-level post. Her "one goal," she told colleagues, is "getting our majority back"...

Richard Posner Debates Milton Friedman

A thing that, as George Shultz likes to remark, everybody likes to do when he is not there to answer--and, alas, he will never answer again.

Judge Posner writes:

The Becker-Posner Blog: Milton Friedman--Posner's Comment: Perhaps his most important general contribution to economic policy was the simple, but when he first propounded it largely ignored or rejected, point that people have a better sense of their interests than third parties, including government officials, do. Friedman argued this point with reference to a host of issues, including the choice between a volunteer and a conscript army. With conscription, government officials determine the most productive use of an individual: should he be a soldier, or a worker in an essential industry, or a student, and if a soldier should he be an infantryman, a medic, etc.? In a volunteer army, in contrast, the determination is made by the individual--he chooses whether to be a soldier or not, and (within limits) if he decides to be a soldier what branch, specialty, etc., to work in. A volunteer army should provide a better matching of person to job than conscription, and in addition should create a more efficient balance between labor and capital inputs into military activity by pricing labor at its civilian opportunity costs.

But this is in general rather than in every case. The smaller the armed forces and the less risk of death or serious injury in military service, the more efficient a volunteer army is relative to a conscript one. These conditions are not satisfied in a general war in which a significant fraction of the young adult population is needed for the proper conduct of the war and the risk of death or serious injury is substantial--the situation in World War II. For then the government's heavy demand for military labor, coupled with the high cost of military service to soldiers at significant risk, would drive the market wage rate for such service through the roof. Very heavy taxes would be required to defray the expense of a volunteer army in these circumstances and those taxes would have misallocative effects that might well exceed the misallocative effects of conscription.

I mention this example because I find slightly off-putting what I sensed to be a dogmatic streak in Milton Friedman. I think his belief in the superior efficiency of free markets to government as a means of resource allocation, though fruitful and largely correct, was embraced by him as an article of faith and not merely as a hypothesis. I think he considered it almost a personal affront that the Scandinavian nations, particularly Sweden, could achieve and maintain very high levels of economic output despite very high rates of taxation, an enormous public sector, and extensive wealth redistribution resulting in much greater economic equality than in the United States. I don't think his analytic apparatus could explain such an anomaly.

I also think that Friedman, again more as a matter of faith than of science, exaggerated the correlation between economic and political freedom. A country can be highly productive though it has an authoritarian political system, as in China, or democratic and impoverished, as was true for the first half century or so of India's democracy and remains true to a considerable extent, since India remains extremely poor though it has a large and thriving middle class--an expanding island in the sea of misery. What is true is that commercial values are in tension with aristocratic and militaristic values that support authoritarian government, and also that as people become economically independent they are less subservient, and so less willing to submit to control by politicians; and also that they become more concerned with the protection of property rights, which authoritarian government threatens. But Friedman seemed to share Friedrich Hayek's extreme and inaccurate view that socialism of the sort that Britain embraced under the old Labour Party was incompatible with democracy, and I don't think that there is a good theoretical or empirical basis for that view. The Road to Serfdom flunks the test of accuracy of prediction!

I imagine that without the element of faith that I have been stressing, Friedman might have lacked the moral courage to propound his libertarian views in the chilly intellectual and political climate in which he first advanced them. So it should probably be reckoned on balance a good thing, though not to my personal taste. His advocacy of school vouchers, the volunteer army (in the era in which he advocated it--which we are still in), and the negative income tax demonstrates the fruitfulness of his master micreconomic insight that, in general, people know better than government how to manage their lives. But perhaps not always...

Let me channel Uncle Milton on one point: replacing a volunteer army with conscription does not get around the "very heavy taxes" with their enormous "misallocative effects" needed to man a wartime army. It simply loads those taxes onto a small group: young adult men (and these days women). It leaves the rest of us scot-free. But it is a redistribution away from the draftees--not an improvement in efficiency.

As to Posner's other points--Friedman's faith in markets, Sweden as a personal affront to Friedman, Friedman's excessive confidence that economic freedom would bring political freedom with it, and the falsification by reality of the main argument of The Road to Surfdom--I think they are very good ones.

A Signal Dropout...

If somebody could please tell me what happens on pages 537-538 of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, I would greatly appreciate it. My hardcover copy has shed those two pages. So there is a gap between:

For a moment the color of pain was all there was, squeezing out consciousness, fear, even startlement...

And:

...finally pounced. Thract looked out across the caldera at the pattern of smoking destruction...

If it weren't for the fact that I remember no gaps in page numbering, I would think it a clever act of meta-literature: the characters are, at that point in the narrative, experiencing massive acts of communications deception, spoofing, and dropouts themselves. So why not visit the same upon readers?...

Never play a game of lurk-and-pounce against a sentient race of spiders.

SONY Drives for PS3 Market Share at Launch

SONY spends a fortune to launch the PS3:

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Tearing Down the PS3: Losing Money on Every Sale, etc.: iSuppli has out its teardown of the PS3, and it contains some fascinating factoids:

Sony is losing an astounding $306.85 to $241.35 in manufacturing and component costs per PS3, depending on the configuration

Cell processor costs are a rock-bottom $85

In the entire history of iSuppli's teardowns it has only seen three semiconductors with 1,200 or more pins; the PS3 alone has three such chips

The size of the loss per unit is, my recollection, the largest in the history of the gaming industry. It is a fairly remarkable demonstration of how the industry has changed, especially when you consider that the PS3 is delivering supercomputer levels of performance.

Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Augusto Pinochet, and Hu Jintao: Authoritarian Liberalism vs. Liberal Authoritarianism

Jamie K. at Blood and Treasure writes:

Blood & Treasure: Hayekian dictatorship: Greg Grandin in Counterpunch sings of Friedman, Hayek, Pinochet, and someone closer to home:

Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state planning would produce not "freedom and prosperity" but "bondage and misery," visited Pinochet's Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile's 1982 financial collapse, agreed that Chile represented a "remarkable success" but believed that Britain's "democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent" make "some of the measures" taken by Pinochet "quite unacceptable."

Well, the left in Britain fought and lost in the 1980’s. But just think what might have happened if it hadn’t fought at all. Anyway:

Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a "transitional period," only as long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. "My personal preference," he told a Chilean interviewer, "leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism." In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had "not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende." Of course, the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet's regime weren't talking.

Hayek's University of Chicago colleague Milton Friedman got the grief, but it was Hayek who served as the true inspiration for Chile's capitalist crusaders. It was Hayek who depicted Allende's regime as a way station between Chile's postwar welfare state and a hypothetical totalitarian future. Accordingly, the Junta justified its terror as needed not only to prevent Chile from turning into a Stalinist gulag but to sweep away fifty years of tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, labor legislation, and social welfare provisions -- a "half century of errors," according to finance minister Sergio De Castro, that was leading Chile down its own road to serfdom.

I think that there is an important difference between Friedman and Hayek. Hayek is an economic (classical) liberal but a social conservative: a believer in respect for throne and altar. Social conservative Hayek can see Pinochet as a good thing: far better to have an authoritarian state that maintains the conservative moral order, if it can be persuaded to adopt laissez-faire economics, than it is to have a democracy that regulates the economy. Friedman, by contrast, hates and fears a government that prohibits use of recreational drugs in your home almost as much as he hates and fears a government that won't let you undersell your politically-powerful competitors. For Friedman, Pinochet is a bad--an aggressive, powerful military dictator--whose evil the Chicago Boys can curb by persuading him to adopt laissez-faire policies. (And, Friedman would say, Pinochet is vastly better than that communist Allende--consider, Friedman would say, that Castro's regime in Cuba is the zenith of what Communist rule can accomplish.)

Jamie K. goes on:

Now, the position of many mainstream intellectuals and economists in China, especially during the mid to late 1990’s was summed up at the time as “liberty before participation”, ie “capitalism now, democracy sometime, maybe.” And there’s still a powerful school of thought in China to the effect that the advantage of CPC rule is that it enables China to establish a full market economy without the kind of “historic mistakes” like the welfare state or the New Deal that you get when the public is allowed to vote itself the keys to the bank. People who call themselves libertarians in China are likely to be strong supporters of the Communist Party, at least on instrumental grounds.

I’ve argued before that many of China’s anti subversion laws – like those against “causing turmoil” or “disturbing social order” - have a Hayekian feel to them. They’re essentially designed as measures to stop people exercising the conceit of reason. If Hayek’s preference was for a liberal dictatorship, China is still the country that best meets that description, despite the recent leftish turn in official policy.

Texas Hold-em?!?!

Hmmm. I actually thought Daniel Craig made a better Bond than Sean Connery. Heresy, I know, but there it is:

Armchair Generalist: A New Bond Isn't A Bad Thing: 1 I wanted to quickly tell you two things about this new Bond movie "Casino Royale." First, Daniel Craig makes an interesting Bond. The movie's trying to show you how Bond became the smooth, hardened killer/lover that Sean Connery played - why does Bond like martinees, Aston Martins, and good clothes - it's all here. Craig plays it well - he's muscled and quick, a much different character from "Layer Cake" - and while he's no Sean Connery, he's going to be better in the next Bond movie.

The movie is about a half hour too long - the director really wanted to make a point about how Bond lost his innocence and became the tough professional, and they really didn't need to drag the movie out so long (2 1/2 hours). The Sony product placement is hardly subtle - the Sony laptops, digital cameras, and personal organizers are all embossed clearly for the audience. But the movie is worth seeing - a Bond who sweats and bleeds and gets messy in fights, and who uses no fancy gadgets or gimmicks. This is not a Roger Moore/Pierce Brosnan Bond model...

But Texas Hold-em? No.

More Nominees for the Stupidest Men Alive Contest

More Stupidest Men Alive contest nominees:

Duncan Black nominates Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution:

Eschaton: The People We Listened To: Kevin Drum pulls up a Ken Pollack flashback:

Just to be clear about this: in 1990, Iraq built a workable nuclear weapon. All it lacked was the fissile material.

Anyone with a wee bit of sense reading those two sentences would know that the person who wrote them is either a shameless propagandist or quite possibly the stupidest f------ person on the face of the planet.

In the early 1990s I built a workable time machine. All it lacked was the flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.

And Juan Cole nominates Condi Rice:

Informed Comment: Rice Urges Iraq to be more like Vietnam (???!!): AP says that Secretary of State Condi Rice asserted Saturday that Iraqis only have a future if they stay within a single state. She pointed to Vietnam's success in reforming its economy and making up with the United States and held it out as a model to Iraq.

Whaaat?

Rice surely knows that the way in which Vietnam achieved national unity was... for the radical forces to drive out the Americans, overthrow pro-American elements, and conquer the whole country. They only went in for this capitalism thing fairly recently. Rice, a Ph.D. and former Provost of Stanford University, shouldn't be saying silly things like that Iraq should emulate Vietnam. I guess if you hang around with W. long enough, you catch whatever it is that he has.

More Nominees for the Stupidest Men Alive Contest

More Stupidest Men Alive contest nominees:

Duncan Black nominates Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution:

Eschaton: The People We Listened To: Kevin Drum pulls up a Ken Pollack flashback:

Just to be clear about this: in 1990, Iraq built a workable nuclear weapon. All it lacked was the fissile material.

Anyone with a wee bit of sense reading those two sentences would know that the person who wrote them is either a shameless propagandist or quite possibly the stupidest f------ person on the face of the planet.

In the early 1990s I built a workable time machine. All it lacked was the flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.

And Juan Cole nominates Condi Rice:

Informed Comment: Rice Urges Iraq to be more like Vietnam (???!!): AP says that Secretary of State Condi Rice asserted Saturday that Iraqis only have a future if they stay within a single state. She pointed to Vietnam's success in reforming its economy and making up with the United States and held it out as a model to Iraq.

Whaaat?

Rice surely knows that the way in which Vietnam achieved national unity was... for the radical forces to drive out the Americans, overthrow pro-American elements, and conquer the whole country. They only went in for this capitalism thing fairly recently. Rice, a Ph.D. and former Provost of Stanford University, shouldn't be saying silly things like that Iraq should emulate Vietnam. I guess if you hang around with W. long enough, you catch whatever it is that he has.

New Home-Building Activity Falls to Lowest Level in 6 Years: Another Point for Nouriel Roubini and the Pessimists

Gulp:

New Home-Building Activity Falls to Lowest Level in 6 Years - WSJ.com: By JEFF BATER. November 17, 2006 11:52 a.m.: WASHINGTON -- New home-building activity in the U.S. resumed its decline in October, tumbling to its lowest level in six years as builders dealt with bloated inventories of unsold property. Housing starts decreased by 14.6% to a seasonally adjusted 1.486 million annual rate, the Commerce Department said Friday. Building permits, an indicator of future building activity, fell a ninth consecutive time....

The government also lowered its original estimate for September starts, a number some economists considered a fluke. Construction rose 4.9% to 1.740 million in September, revised from an originally reported 5.9% climb to 1.772 million. Starts fell 5.7% in August, 4% during July, and 6.1% in June. Construction rose 6.6% in May. Economists had expected a less-severe drop in October. The median estimate of 22 economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires was a 5.6% fall to a 1.672 million annual rate. The 14.6% decline was the largest since 16.1% in March 2005, and it carried starts to their lowest since 1.463 million in July 2000....

In a sign that starts will likely continue to fall, October building permits dropped 6.3% to an annual rate of 1.535 million; the last month permits rose was January. Economists expected permits would be up by 0.1% to 1.640 million. Permits decreased a revised 5.2% last month to 1.638 million, compared with an earlier estimated 6.3% drop to 1.619 million....

The housing weakness trimmed a full percentage point off economic growth in the July-September quarter, when the economy expanded at a tepid 1.6% rate...

Write to Jeff Bater at mailtoLjeff.bater@dowjones.com

The Obviously Correct Grand Strategy of the United States of America

Blake Hounshell on the obviously correct grand strategy of the United States:

American Prospect Online - The Old New World Order: A revival of pragmatic liberal internationalism is what the world, and America, need now. By Blake Hounshell: Shadi Hamid and Spencer Ackerman debated what should serve as the lodestar of a progressive foreign policy vision. Hamid argued that the United States should make the promotion of democracy the centerpiece of its foreign policy, while Ackerman advocated that human rights take that role.... But neither Hamid nor Ackerman offered the correct answer. As the small example of Vietnam helps to illustrate, the United States ought to be redirecting its energies toward renewing its strength and expanding the postwar liberal world order. Do that, and the rest -- democracy, human rights, liberal reforms -- will eventually follow.

Ronald Beisner's new biography of Dean Acheson, this philosophy's most able practitioner, tells the familiar story of this world's creation from the perspective of its key founder. Although Secretary of State Acheson was a lawyer, not an economist, and his president Harry Truman a haberdasher rather than an international trade expert, their instincts were sound. Together with visionary European statesmen such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, they led the creation of a postwar order that has brought the world to unparalleled levels of peace and prosperity. Acheson's main concern was to create a liberal system on what he later called the "half a world" that the United States had come to dominate, facing off against the Soviet bloc. Economic openness, and ever-closer economic integration in Europe, were the primary drivers of this new system....

Acheson was first and foremost a pragmatist, constantly evaluating policy in light of the evidence. When the facts changed, so did his views. The best example, which Beisner elucidates in meticulous detail, is how Acheson rapidly transformed from a cautious advocate of sharing nuclear technology with the Soviets to a stalwart Cold Warrior who sought to use "situations of strength" to compel better behavior from them....

The key to any viable doctrine is that it offer comprehensive guidance on the whole range of foreign policy problems. The Bush Doctrine has failed spectacularly (though this may not yet be clear to all just yet). Hamid and Ackerman's alternatives fall short: how does promoting democracy and/or human rights help us deal with the diverse challenges listed above? Acheson's approach to the world offers a way forward: a pragmatic liberal internationalism underpinned by renewed American strength.

In practice, this means extricating ourselves as honorably as possible from Iraq, creating new security structures in the Middle East and Asia to deal with the threats of the Iraqi civil war, Iran, and North Korea, and incorporating the counterinsurgency lesson so painfully learned in Iraq into military doctrine and practice in Afghanistan. Equally importantly, it means reinvigorating American leadership on global economic issues such as the Doha Round, and working with Europe to devise a more realistic, multilateral approach to Middle East reform. These and other vital priorities are hardly likely to be addressed properly under the Bush presidency, so they will be up to the Democrats in Congress and in a future administration to tackle.

And who knows? Some day, we may see Iraq join the WTO.

Never Fire Your Best Polemicist If Your Dork Quotient Is More than 30%

"Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line." "Never call your own website 'poor and stupid'." "Never play poker with a man called 'Doc'." "Never eat at a place called 'Mom's'." "Never use vodka to try to remove bloodstains from white linen." "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." And now we have another one: **If the dork quotient of your magazine is more than 30%, never, ever, ever, fire your best polemicist**: Anderson watches the unleashed Spencer Ackerman in action. It is a thing of beauty, in its own way: >[Thus Blogged Anderson.](http://andersonblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/beware-of-firing-your-polemicist-tnrs.html): Beware of firing your polemicist: _The New Republic's_ decision to fire Spencer Ackerman cannot possibly have done anything positive for their subscription numbers. Besides which, if you thought Paul O'Neill talked bad about *his* former boss, you ain't seen nothin' yet: >>Among the most annoying of TNR tropes is the flight to meta-analysis as soon as the recognition dawns that the magazine can't win an argument. And here, it pains and saddens me to say, TNR embraces it like a security blanket. First, TNR concedes that nothing it can possibly desire is likely to occur: "The U.S. presence in Iraq will not last long. Perhaps this new political reality will serve as shock therapy, scaring Iraq's warring factions into negotiations that can prevent the worst sectarian warfare. But perhaps not." The "perhaps not" is an intellectual prophylactic: it changes the subject before one can ask what in the world the U.S. could tell the Sunnis and the Shiites that could make them believe that that their interests are better served by peace than by war. If TNR has any idea what it means by this, it has an obligation to say so. But -- and, my friends, I can tell you, because I went to those Thursday editorial meetings for years -- these people have no idea what they mean.... >>Then, finally, comes the coup de grace. Now that TNR has dispensed with its empty attempt to discuss what ought to be done about Iraq, it comes to the real question: >>>[A]s we pore over the lessons of this misadventure, we do not conclude that our past misjudgments warrant a rush into the cold arms of "realism." Realism, yes; but not "realism." American power may not be capable of transforming ancient cultures or deep hatreds, but that fact does not absolve us of the duty to conduct a foreign policy that takes its moral obligations seriously. As we attempt to undo the damage from a war that we never should have started, our moral obligations will not vanish, and neither will our strategic needs. >>Please believe me when I say that this makes me want to cry.... This is the emptiest of evasions -- a fetishization of "seriousness" without ever actually being serious. In one of my last pieces for them, I wrote that "Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not 'Were we wrong?' but 'Why were we wrong?' and 'How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?'" I begged TNR during my time there to address these last questions. But now it's dawned on me that my former friends never will. >Ouch. Anderson does not see Spencer Ackerman's reaction to Frank Foer's turning TNR into a clipping service for the _Weekly Standard_ >[toohotfortnr](http://toohotfortnr.blogspot.com/2006/11/since-you-been-gone-i-can-breathe-for.html): Hey, Frank, great editing, buddy. You really are a credit to the magazine, and I'm a total dick. Here's what you let Bob Kagan write for you this week: >>Some claim that we don't have 50,000 troops to send to Iraq. In fact, the troops are available. Sending additional forces to Iraq means lengthening troop rotations, as the United States has done in previous major conflicts. Sustaining such an increased deployment, however, will require a substantial increase in the overall size of the Army and Marines. This increase, which does not require a draft but does require money, is necessary regardless of what we do in Iraq. It is stunning that this administration has attempted to fight two wars and has envisioned other possible interventions with a force clearly inadequate for these global commitments. >And here's what he wrote with Bill Kristol this very week: >>Those who claim that it is impossible to send 50,000 more troops to Iraq, because the troops don't exist, are wrong. The troops do exist. But it is also true that the Army and Marines are stretched, and that this new deployment needs to be accompanied by rapid steps to increase the overall size of American ground forces. For six years, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused to acknowledge that his vision of the American military of the future did not match the present reality of American military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world. We trust the new secretary of defense will understand the necessity of dealing urgently with the manpower crisis in our military. >Hey, I didn't know you wanted to turn TNR into a Weekly Standard clip service. You're totally up there with Kinsley and Hertzberg! Ouch. Anderson does not see Spencer Ackerman's reaction to Marty Peretz: >[toohotfortnr: civilized man, you were keeper to me -- now your animal is free, and you're free to die](http://toohotfortnr.blogspot.com/2006/11/civilized-man-you-were-keeper-to-me.html): Marty [Peretz] writes: >>Even the bare rudiments of civilization will not soon come back to the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates. >That's exactly right. The Iraqi civil war will be fought with rocks and sticks. Imagine the danger if they realized how to harness fire! Lucky for us that the savages have not learned how to use the wheel... Ouch. Or to Leon Wieseltier: >[toohotfortnr: bow down, bow down -- God will infest you with maggots, my son](http://toohotfortnr.blogspot.com/2006/11/bow-down-bow-down-god-will-infest-you.html): Oh, Leon! Why? You studied under Sir Isaiah! How could you ever, ever, write this line: >>For three-and-a-half years, the Iraqis have been a free people. >You knew him and I didn't. But I daresay Isaiah Berlin would have upbraided you for saying this. No, my friend, chaos is not freedom, the Iraqis were never free, and as Becker and Fagan put it, only a fool would say that. Ouch.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

This week in Journamalism

Some tasty morsels from this week in Journamalism.

We open with a warning to the usually reliable Financial Times:

Financial Times! Kristol and Kagan sent, and you published:

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Bush must call for reinforcements in Iraq: By Robert Kagan and William Kristol: President George W. Bush has just over two years left in office. The central question facing him is: what kind of Iraq will he bequeath to his successor? Will it be a metastasising mess dumped on the doorstep of the next president, or an Iraq on the path to stability and success? The answer will determine how this president should be remembered by future generations.

There are, of course, other grave issues that will consume the Bush administration over the next two years: the continuing need to defend Americans from terrorist threats; Iran's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons; containment and weakening of a nuclear-armed North Korea; an increasingly belligerent Russia; and manifold challenges presented by a rising China. But the fact remains that Mr Bush (correctly, in our view) took the nation to war to remove Saddam Hussein, and the success or failure of that war will be central to his legacy.

The trajectory is downward towards failure. Indeed, this has been the case for more than three years, ever since Pentagon officials decided to put far too few troops in Iraq...

At that point, Financial Times, you should have pressed the "delete" key. You do your readers no good service by printing the writings of people who pretend to think that it was "Pentagon officials" who decided to put far too few troops in Iraq. It was Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld who decided to do so.

Your advantage, Financial Times, is that you rarely publish outright lies. Guard that advantage carefully.

We continue with Matthew Yglesias vainly begging Amy Goldstein and Lyndsey Layton to please do some accurate reporting:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: Washington Post takes a look at the Democratic agenda.

The necessity of some GOP votes, combined with the austere fiscal climate, has influenced how Democrats plan to proceed in their first weeks. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the next speaker of the House, has said that one of the first domestic issues she will bring up will be an increase in the minimum wage by $2.10 per hour, to $7.25. The cost of that would largely be borne by private employers, not the government. President Bush has supported similar proposals, said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman.

No doubt Dana Perino did say that, but it's not, you know, true. The "similar" proposals Bush has supported are "compromises" that involve combining small increases in the minimum wage with giant tax cuts for rich people.

We find Kevin Drum doing some intellectual garbage cleanup as the Washington Post messes itself once again:

The Washington Monthly: RELIGIOUS VOTERS.... Why do I keep writing about the exit polls? Because of stories like this from the Washington Post's Alan Cooperman:

Religious liberals contended that a concerted effort by Democrats since 2004 to appeal to people of faith had worked minor wonders, if not electoral miracles, in races across the country.

....Democrats recaptured the Catholic vote they had lost two years ago. They sliced the GOP's advantage among weekly churchgoers to 12 percentage points, down from 18 points in 2004.

....In House races in 2004, 74 percent of white evangelicals voted for Republicans and 25 percent for Democrats, a 49-point spread, according to exit polls. This year, Republicans received 70 percent of the white evangelical vote and Democrats got 28 percent, a 42-point spread.

Once more with feeling: in the the overall national vote, Democrats picked up 5 percentage points compared to 2004. Among Catholics they picked up 6 points. Among weekly churchgoers they picked up 3 points. Among white evangelicals they picked up 3 points....

Nationally, turnout among religious voters was as high as it was in 2004, and their shift toward Democrats was either the same or a bit less than the overall national shift. I'd love to be able to say that Democrats made some disproportionate inroads in this group, since it's such an important part of the GOP base, but they didn't. People need to quit saying it.

And a notable act of past journamalism from last March causes Glenn Greenwald to get mediaeval--nay, to get neolithic--on the New Republic:

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Why the Beltway class can't comprehend the Russ Feingolds of the world: UPDATE: One of the best/worst examples of this emptiness comes, unsurprisingly, from The New Republic, courtesy of Ryan Lizza, who chortled at the political stupidity of Feingold's censure resolution but -- of course -- knew exactly why Feingold was doing it (h/t Michael):

Feingold is mystified by the reaction. Democrats, he said this week, are "cowering with this president's numbers so low." The liberal blogosphere, aghast at how wimpy Democrats are being, has risen up in a chorus of outrage....

The nature of the split is obvious. Feingold is thinking about 2008. Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, and other Democrats are thinking about 2006. Feingold cares about wooing the anti-Bush donor base on the web and putting some of his '08 rivals--Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Evan Bayh--in uncomfortable positions. Reid and Schumer care about winning the six seats it will take for Democrats to win control of the Senate . . . .

So the partisans on the left cheering Feingold appear to have both the policy and the politics wrong. Censure is meaningless. Changing the FISA law is the way to address Bush's overreach. And the only way for Democrats to change FISA is for them to take back the Senate. This week, Feingold's censure petition has made that goal just a little bit more difficult to achieve. What an ass.

So knowing and sophisticated. So wise and insightful to the hard-core political realities. Always above the lowly impassioned masses and their misguided, simplistic notions (such as the belief that there should be consequences for presidential lawbreaking -- how excitable and stupid that is). TNR is always so cleverly restrained and calculating.... And all of that is to say nothing about the complete incoherence of Lizza's "argument." How could "changing FISA"... possibly be a solution to the president's lawbreaking when the whole point is that the President claims he has no obligation to comply with FISA...? Censure was the only way (short of impeachment) for Congress to... express its objections to the President's lawbreaking. "Changing FISA" was... a complete non-sequitur.... But to Lizza, that's the more moderate, passionless and less disruptive course. Therefore, by definition, it's the best one...

Eric Boehlert watches the insanity:

Media Matters - The Karl Rove crush: by Eric Boehlert:

"If I were them [Democrats], I'd be scared to death about November's elections." -- Mark Halperin, director of ABC News' political unit, June 22, 2006

My favorite article from the just-completed campaign season appeared in the October 9 issue of Time, in which Mike Allen and James Carney wrote a detailed piece about why Republicans were not worried about the upcoming elections. "The G.O.P.'s Secret Weapon," read the bold headline. "You think the Republicans are sure to lose big in November? They aren't. Here's why things don't look so bad to them," read the subhead.

The article went on and on about how an "eerie, Zen-like calm" had fallen over GOP operatives who, despite a mountain of public polling data, did not fear big election losses. In fact, they coolly insisted their own prospects were "getting better by the day."... Time ended on this chipper note: "As long as they [Republicans] end up keeping control of both houses, they still come out the winner on Election Day."...

[T]he tone of the Time piece -- the working assumption that Republicans would naturally find a way to outsmart Democrats -- was startling.... Bush at the time stood as the most unpopular second-term president in modern history... had spent the previous 18 months careening between a series of political debacles (Social Security, Katrina, immigration, port security, Iraq).... Bush's presidency was in shambles (think Jimmy Carter, circa 1979), yet Time eagerly passed along the transparent spin about how Republican chances were "getting better by the day." Those kinds of simplistic campaign talking points worked wonders with right-wing bloggers and radio talk show hosts who excitedly repeated them as a way to calm their nerves during the campaign homestretch. But Time?

Sure enough, its 1,500-word article did not quote a single Democratic or independent source. It was, in the most literal sense, transparent RNC spin....

[T]he GOP's-sitting-pretty angle became something of an obsession for Time's Allen... October efforts such as "Why The Democratic Wave Could Be A Washout" and "Why Some Top Republicans Think They May Still Have the Last Laugh"... Allen's November 2... "Upset in Michigan?" which hyped the Republican-friendly theory that its candidate there had a chance of knocking off incumbent Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow.... no polling data... no quotes from any Democratic or independent observers. The entire Michigan item consisted of quotes from Republicans insisting their guy really, really had a shot....

Rove gave his first, exclusive post-election interview to Time's Allen, who continued to treat his key White House source very gently...

Semi-Daily Journal Archive

Friday, November 24, 2006

Duncan Black Is a National Treasure

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Federal Reserve Independence

Essential Thanksgiving Movie

Essential Reading on the Bushies: Mark Danner in NYRB

More Essential Reading on the Bushies: Mark Danner in NYRB

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Shaken-Not-Stirred Blogging...

Is Neil King Being Naive or Vicious? We Report, You Decide

What To Do

Americans Figure Out There Are Two George Bushes

Econ 101b: Fall 2006: November 21: Unemployment and the NAIRU

Econ 210a: Fall 2006: Memo Question for November 29--Spread of Industrialization

Monday, November 20, 2006

Never Fire Your Best Polemicist If Your Dork Quotient Is More than 30%

Jackie Calmes Exhbits a Tinge of Optimistic Naivete

Richard Posner Debates Milton Friedman

A Signal Dropout...

SONY Drives for PS3 Market Share at Launch

Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Augusto Pinochet, and Hu Jintao: Authoritarian Liberalism vs. Liberal Authoritarianism

Texas Hold-em?!?!

More Nominees for the Stupidest Men Alive Contest

More Nominees for the Stupidest Men Alive Contest

New Home-Building Activity Falls to Lowest Level in 6 Years: Another Point for Nouriel Roubini and the Pessimists

The Obviously Correct Grand Strategy of the United States of America

Never Fire Your Best Polemicist If Your Dork Quotient Is More than 30%

Sunday, November 19, 2006

This week in Journamalism

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