Category Archives: Short Notes

A weekly feature that collects interesting links and adds a paragraph or two of content.

The Frontrunner Turns Into a Newt and other horserace notes

January 23, 2012 – 1:08 pm

I don’t want to make a habit of focusing the Sift on the horserace for the Republican nomination. I often criticize the corporate media for indulging in the horserace’s drama and conflict (as if democracy were really all about personalities) and ignoring the serious business of governing the world’s most powerful nation (as if public issues were just bludgeons for candidates to swing at each other). I don’t want to fall into the same trap.

But then a week like this past one blows away all my virtuous intentions.

After New Hampshire, Mitt Romney’s nomination was supposed to be inevitable, and South Carolina was about to give him the final stamp of approval. But by Saturday, Carolina’s landslide winner had turned into a Newt. And by this morning the witchcraft is nearly complete and Gingrich is leading the first post-SC poll of Florida as well.

InTrade still gives Romney a 62% chance of being the nominee, but that’s crashing from over 90%. If that first poll holds up and Gingrich really does win Florida, he’ll be the frontrunner.

A number of things came together to cast this spell: Gingrich turned a devastating personal story into a counter-attack against the media. He also effectively dog-whistled to racists, taking advantage of an almost all-white SC primary electorate. Plus, Romney fumbled the tax-return issue (Ruth Marcus said he was “choosing to pull off the Band-Aid with excruciating slowness”) and did a poor job of parrying attacks related to health care and abortion.

In the short run, Sarah Palin was right about ABC’s interview with Gingrich’s ex-wife on Thursday. Mrs. Gingrich II claimed that Newt asked for an “open marriage” so that he could continue his affair with the future Mrs. Gingrich III. Palin said the interview would

incentivize conservatives and independents who are so sick of the politics of personal destruction, because it’s played so selectively by the media, that their target, in this case Newt, he’s now going to soar even more.

Gingrich played it that way in Thursday evening’s debate, launching a crowd-pleasing counter-attack against CNN’s John King. Gingrich already had momentum, but that debate performance locked up South Carolina for him. His anti-media tirade was the lead on all the news shows (even though I thought Rick Santorum had a much stronger debate overall).

Remember, though, that the sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain also gave Cain a short-term boost. In the long run, I think the “open marriage” phrase will stick in the public mind and be a slow-but-steady drag on Gingrich. At a minimum, his rivals have a new rhetorical hook to use. Expect to hear metaphors about Newt’s open relationship with the truth, with conservative principles, and with anything else opponents want to raise doubts about.

Rush Limbaugh may think “everybody has an angry ex-spouse“, but it’s equally true that every woman has a man who done her wrong. (For at least three women, that man is Rush Limbaugh.) If they start identifying Newt with that guy, it’ll cost him.

The NYT’s Charles Blow:

Gingrich seems to understand the historical weight of the view among some southern whites, many of whom have migrated to the Republican party, that blacks are lazy and addicted to handouts. He is able to give voice to those feelings without using those words. He is able to make people believe that a fundamentally flawed and prejudicial argument that demeans minorities is actually for their uplift.

In short, Gingrich has been dog whistling. He doesn’t openly say: “Lazy blacks expect you hard-working white taxpayers to support them.” But if you believe that already, you listen to Gingrich and think, “That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about!”

Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to Gingrich by quoting Jane Austen:

when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.

Hence the sense of injury when politicians like Gingrich are accused of pandering to racists, when in fact they are and know that they are.

A few facts about Gingrich’s “food-stamp president” rhetoric and the way he tries to make the issue food stamps vs. paychecks:

  • White food-stamp recipients outnumber blacks almost 2-to-1. Percentage-wise, blacks are more likely to be on food stamps than whites, but it’s not a black issue.
  • About half of food-stamp households with children already have jobs.
  • Nationwide, the average per-person food stamp benefit is $134 a month. That might keep you from starving, but it’s not going to replace a job.

In short, there’s no reason to believe that cutting food stamps would motivate people to get jobs. And looking at the causality the other way, liberals also hope for a job-rich economy that makes food stamps unnecessary. The question is how to get there. If conservative policies created jobs, we wouldn’t have been on the brink of a depression at the end of the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, open marriage (or polyamory) is topical again. Salon explores the ups and downs, and the NYT has a free-for-all.

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment is freaking out. Josh Marshall explains why with Gingrich’s national favorable/unfavorable graph (which doesn’t reproduce here).

As he galvanizes the most extreme elements in the Republican electorate, Gingrich’s unfavorability with the general electorate is spiking. Nate Silver referenced the same graph while saying Gingrich “would be one of the most unpopular candidates ever to be nominated by a major party.” (Gingrich’s favorability numbers have only gotten worse since Nate dismissed his chances last March.)

Real Clear Politics’ average of national polls has Obama narrowly ahead of Romney (47%-45%), while crushing Gingrich (50%-40%). But in the CNN exit polls, the South Carolina primary voters mainly looking for an Obama-defeating candidate picked Gingrich over Romney by a wider margin. He got 51% of those votes compared with 41% overall.

This is what happens when people believe their own propaganda. Tea Party Republicans claim they’re not a far-right fringe, they’re mainstream America. Believing that, they think mainstream America hates President Obama like they do. Gingrich does the best job of inspiring and channelling their hatred, so they think he must be the best candidate to send into the general election.

They’re kidding themselves. In the real world, even people who doubt Obama’s competence tend to like him personally. So going after Obama (or his wife or his kids or his dog) with nasty and racially polarizing rhetoric will backfire on the national stage. And while Republicans love to make fun of Obama’s teleprompter— another dog-whistle about the intelligence of blacks — Obama actually thinks on his feet quite well. In a debate, he won’t be the punching bag Gingrich supporters imagine.

Despite his disappointing showing in South Carolina and low national poll numbers, Rick Santorum is right to stay in the race. Here’s his scenario: Gingrich will crash again, Romney will be damaged goods — and then it’s Santorum or a brokered convention, which hasn’t happened in half a century.

Through the magic of video editing, Mitt Romney debates Martin Luther King.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (2)

We Need More Bureaucrats, and other short notes

January 23, 2012 – 12:52 pm

Guess what happens when you cut the budget of the IRS? The government collects less in taxes, with a net increase in the federal deficit. Plus, the IRS relies more on automation and less on people, so a taxpayer with a legitimate complaint has a hard time getting the ear of anybody who could fix the problem.

That’s the gist of the 2011 report of the National Taxpayer Advocate, and it’s a microcosm of what’s wrong with anti-bureaucrat rage.

When your car runs badly, you could say, “Damn that car! I’m going to cut its maintenance!” But that would be stupid, wouldn’t it? Ditto for government. If you have to deal with a stressed-out clerk after waiting an hour in line at the DMV, cutting budgets and firing clerks might be a satisfying revenge fantasy. But it’s not exactly a solution.

Similarly, if you find yourself wasting time and money complying with some regulation that should never have applied to you to begin with, the problem probably isn’t that too many bureaucrats are making too many rules. More likely, bureaucracies have made sweeping rules and don’t have time to make exceptions for special cases because they’re understaffed.

The battle is on in Wisconsin. The petition to recall Governor Scott Walker got a million signatures. Officials are having problems hiring people to review the signatures, because they have “had trouble locating job seekers in the Madison area who did not sign the petitions”

In President Obama’s video message to Betty White’s 90th birthday celebration, he asked to see her long-form birth certificate.

The new Birtherism: Did Obama get “foreign student” loans? And is there any reason to raise this question other than the evidence that factcheck.org called “a hoax” in 2009?

The documentary Hot Coffee takes another look at the anti-McDonalds lawsuit that has been distorted into evidence for tort reform. What if what everybody knows about that lawsuit is false?

Republicans in Congress forced President Obama to make a fast decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline, and he surprised a lot of us by deciding against it. But naturally, that’s not the end of it.

Senator Scott Brown asks about the “teachers, firefighters, policemen” who will be affected if the Bush tax cuts go away for households making more than $250,000 a year. TPM tries to figure out if there are any such people and how affected they would be.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich raises the spectre of NY janitors making “an absurd amount of money” which turns out to be $37,710 after two years.

Batteries for electric cars might get much better.

The idea of America as a “nation, under God” may go back to Lincoln, but the phrase has a little known history after that: It was revived in the 1930s by monied interests looking for religious cover in opposing the New Deal.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Truth Vigilantes and other short notes

January 16, 2012 – 11:50 am

The most clueless post of the week came from the NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane: Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante? Brisbane was

looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

So if a “newsmaker” says the sky is green, should the Times let that stand? or explain to its readers that the sky is actually blue?

That post drew 327 comments and countless responses from bloggers and other pundits, almost unanimously (except for National Review) saying: If you have to ask that question, the Times is in worse trouble than we thought.

Brisbane wrote a follow-up claiming that we had all misunderstood the question, which prompted another avalanche of responses saying that we understood it perfectly.

Greg Sargent sums up current practice, which is to print a fact-check column once (maybe), but not reference it when a false claim gets repeated again and again. Result: “any Times customer reading [the false claims] comes away misled.”

Glenn Greenwald translates newsmaker to mean “those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems” and points out that critics of the newsmaking elite get a different treatment: “their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.”

Jay Rosen gives a long-term perspective:

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years … the drift of professional practice over time was to bracket or suspend sharp questions of truth and falsehood in order to avoid charges of bias, or excessive editorializing. Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground–more like pros–when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false.

Salon’s Marcus Cederstrom asks the question I’ve been wondering about for weeks: What if Tim Tebow were Muslim?

In all the uproar about American Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, one point hasn’t gotten much attention: All the way back to George Washington, America has tried to maintain a code of honor for its troops. (We didn’t always succeed, but we always tried.) Why?

Here’s why: The American ideal is the citizen soldier who eventually rejoins civilized society. America’s fighting men and women are not supposed to be packs of jackals that we unleash on our enemies and then forget about. They are us, and when they’re done with the disagreeable job of war, we intend to welcome them home.

So when Dana Loesch says, “Come on, people, this is a war“, she may think she’s supporting our troops, but she isn’t. By implying that barbaric behavior is normal in our military, she’s undermining our soldiers’ eventual re-integration into civilian life.

If this is how Loesch pictures Marines, how will she feel when an ex-Marine moves in next door or wants to marry her little sister? Or has the distance between Marines and media stars grown so great that such possibilities are unthinkable now?

While I enjoy Jon Stewart’s pokes at our political system from the outside, nothing tops the way Stephen Colbert demonstrates its abusrdity from within.

When it became clear that unaccountable Super-PACs were going to dominate the 2012 election cycle, Colbert started one: Americans United for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow. It’s a stunt, but it’s not just a stunt. He really raised money and put ads on TV in Iowa.

This week, Colbert demonstrated the absurdity of Super-PACs that are devoted to one candidate (but allegedly don’t co-ordinate with that candidate’s campaign) by transferring his Super-PAC to Jon Stewart and then announcing his own candidacy for president. Colbert and Stewart worked out their “non-cooperation” agreement on national TV.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

And now, the Super-PAC has the absurd anti-Romney attack ad Mitt the Ripper on the air in South Carolina: If Romney really believes corporations are people, then he was a serial killer during his time at Bain Capital.

It was amazing to watch how quickly and effectively the Republican establishment moved to shut down criticism of Romney’s “vulture capitalism“. TPM’s 100-seconds series captured it:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The point here seems to be that capitalism transcends good and evil. To make any moral comment on Romney’s business practices is beyond the pale, and puts you on the road to Soviet Communism. Such a nihilistic argument is pretty weird for a party that claims to be the natural home of American Christians.

Dahlia Lithwick: “If a Republican successor of Obama gets to replace both Kennedy and Ginsburg, it’s fair to predict that the Roberts Court may include five or even six of the most conservative jurists since the FDR era.” We wouldn’t just see a loss of abortion rights, but “a jurisprudence that skews pro-business, pro-life, anti-environment, and toward entangling the church with the state.”

If you haven’t checked out Vi Hart’s YouTube channel, you’re missing the Internet’s best example of charming geekiness.

It’s always important on MLK Day, to remember just how radical King was. He didn’t promote a vague be-nice message, but took outside-the-current-mainstream stands on major issues.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

My Boring Primary Season and other short notes

January 9, 2012 – 12:35 pm

Primary season in New Hampshire has been dull this year. There’s no Democratic race, and Republican candidates conceded the state to Romney a long time ago. Plus, it’s been harder to find out where candidates are, and a lot of their speeches are at business-club meetings or other gatherings the rest of us aren’t invited to.

Ah, the old days. About a dozen candidates campaigned here all through the summer of 2007. It didn’t take effort to see them, it took effort to avoid them. One day I saw a crowd gathering in front of City Hall, and found myself at a Fred Thompson rally. My wife and I went to one of our usual restaurants and discovered that Barack Obama was answering questions behind the divider.

This time around, Republican candidates didn’t arrive in force until this week. I feel like they’re asking me to dance only because prettier girls turned them down.

Wednesday I stirred myself to go hear Newt Gingrich in Manchester, and he didn’t even answer audience questions. (John McCain spoiled me. The whole point of his NH campaign was to demonstrate his amazing ability to answer unscripted questions 12 hours a day.) Here’s what I learned: Newt doesn’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon; in spite of George W. Bush’s 8-year failed experiment, he still believes in supply-side economics; and he talks a lot about Reagan but never mentions Bush.

Stop the presses.

I suppose I’d still like to see for myself whether Rick Santorum is as scary as he seems on TV. But it’s got to be today or tomorrow, and my heart isn’t in it.

Nate Silver is giving Mitt Romney a 98% chance of winning tomorrow. Sure. Why not?

David Waldman demolishes the “Mitt Romney, job creator” myth and coins the great phrase locust capitalism. Several of Romney’s business take-overs resemble what Tony Soprano used to call a “bust out“: You borrow a bunch of money in the company’s name, take it, then declare the company bankrupt and fire everybody. Mitt is a great businessman because he figured out how to do a bust out without breaking the law.

Looks like it’s not just liberals making this point.

Once again in December: Private sector employment up, public sector down. Where is this huge expansion of government the Republicans keep talking about?

The Obama jobs record in a nutshell: During the first six months of his administration, the continuing Bush downturn destroyed 3.1 million jobs. Since then, 1.2 million jobs have come back.

As I pointed out two months ago in Jobless Recoveries Are Normal Now, it’s hard to either credit or blame Obama’s economic policies for this, because although this recession is deeper than the last two (and was already on Inauguration Day) the shape is the same. That pattern is continuing.

A popular Republican talking point is that they represent “equality of opportunity” while Democrats want government to guarantee “equality of outcome”. More accurately: Both sides want equality of opportunity, but Democrats regard inequality of outcome as evidence of inequality of opportunity, while Republicans believe the poor deserve their fate.

Paul Krugman makes two points that can’t be repeated often enough:

  1. America has less equality of opportunity than “socialist” countries like Canada.
  2. Republicans are against any attempts to make opportunity more equal.

The Economist adds this comment on the politics of the opportunity/outcome argument:

The risk in Mr Romney’s position is that, to the extent that people recognise that the staggeringly rich keep getting wealthier while regular people aren’t getting anywhere, arguing that this represents “equality of opportunity” is saying that regular people don’t deserve to get ahead. The reason Mitt Romney is fabulously rich and you aren’t, on this telling, is that he deserves it and you don’t.

Try telling that to this couple.

Want to explain “socialism” to your conservative friends and family? Let Nurse Pam help.

I love Keith Olbermann — not the least for giving Rachel Maddow her big break — but do you get the impression he might be hard to deal with?

I keep waiting for somebody to draw the right lesson from the death of Kim Jong Il: Kim had nuclear weapons for the last 3-5 years of his life and never used them.

Every time the NeoCons beat the drum to attack another country (as they’ve doing with Iran for years now), the message is: “Their ruler is crazy. Deterrence won’t work with somebody like that.” We heard it about Saddam, and now we’re hearing it about Ahmadinejad.

This is great framing for the warmongers, because it tempts peaceniks to defend the sanity of somebody the American public doesn’t like. “Saddam/Ahmadinejad/the-next-villain is saner than you think” isn’t a winning political message.

Now we have a better response: “Is he crazier than Kim Jong Il?”

Rick Perlstein: To Rick Santorum, “freedom” means owing your soul to the company store.

My prediction of a Santorum victory in Iowa was off by eight votes. Or was it?

Montana’s Supreme Court just made a direct challenge to Citizen’s United. I’ll try to explain better after I read the decision.

When banks become hot investments, watch out. Good banking is boring banking.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (2)

Strategic Voting and other short notes

January 2, 2012 – 12:38 pm

A week from tomorrow I’ll be voting in the New Hampshire primary. But I’m a Democrat and the interesting primary is in the other party, so should I vote as a Republican?

I’ve done it before. In 2000, I crossed over to vote for McCain against Bush, even though I wouldn’t have voted for McCain against Gore. But I didn’t do it to benefit Gore. I just thought McCain would be a much better president than Bush.

That’s my ethic for strategic voting, and I recommend it to Democrats in the later-voting states: Don’t try to screw up the Republicans, vote to improve the field for November. Yes, it would probably improve Obama’s chances for re-election if, say, Bachmann won the Republican nomination. But that can backfire: How would you feel if some October scandal made Obama un-electable and you had to live with President Bachmann for the next four years?

Right now, Intrade says Romney is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination. Would somebody else on the Republican side be a much better president than Romney? Probably not. So I’ve let the deadline for changing my registration pass. With reservations that I’ve outlined here and here, I’ll vote for Obama.

In a season dominated by the likes of MasterCard, WikiLeaks reminded us of what’s really priceless.

Creating the illusion of three dimensions on a flat TV screen is more than just providing different images to each eye, as current 3DTVs do. If you are your screen’s only viewer, if your 3D glasses also tell the system where you are in the room, and if the system has vast computing power, then it can do something called head tracking, which makes a huge difference, as seen here.

TPM explains why Romney doesn’t want to release his tax returns: He didn’t just make a lot more money than you, he did it without holding a job. That means he paid a much lower tax rate. (I say: “Eliminate the work penalty!“)

These two recent Paul Krugman columns are worth your time: Nobody Understands Debt and The Post-Truth Campaign.

It’s a little bitchy, but Salon’s annual Hack List is a guilty pleasure.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Victoryish, and other short notes

December 19, 2011 – 12:59 pm

President Obama’s announcement of the end of the Iraq War raises a number of issues. First, it’s only sort-of true as long as the AUMF for Iraq remains in effect. And even if it is over, how should we commemorate the end of a huge mistake? AlterNet summarizes the enormous costs and the minimal benefits. And Mark Fiore imagines President Obama declaring “Victoryish!”

Whenever liberals propose taxing the rich, conservatives say higher rates will prevent small businesses from hiring more people. NPR went looking for actual small businesspeople who would say the same thing, and couldn’t find them.

Gar Alperovitz, whose book Unjust Desserts I reviewed a while ago, had an NYT op-ed proclaiming co-ops as the way of the future. I want to believe, Gar. I really do.

The Rick Perry parodies continue to role in. A Democratic candidate for Congress made one. And Scott Bateman cartooned over the Perry audio.

Take the quiz: What kind of liberal are you? (I come out as a “working class warrior”.)

It’s not just anecdotal any more: The EPA links fracking to water contamination.

Unlike most conservative columnists, Ross Douthat occasionally provides some insight I find interesting. Like this one: Ron Paul represents what Tea Partiers imagine themselves to be, while Newt Gingrich is what liberals imagine Tea Partiers are.

The columns of Grist’s Greenie Pig (a.k.a. Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan) examine that very important question: How do you achieve a more sustainable lifestyle without being a superior jerk about it? In this one, she explores the etiquette of bringing re-usable leftover containers to restaurants.

Retired air force Lieutenant Colonel William J. Astore coins a different usage of the 99%/1% split: The 1% who fight our wars and the 99% whose lives are virtually unaffected by them.

We’ve chosen -— or let others do the choosing —- to remove ourselves from all the pain and horror of the wars being waged in our name. And that’s a choice we’ve made at our peril, since a state of permanent remote war has weakened our military, drained our treasury, and eroded our rights and freedoms.

What happens, Astore wonders, if the military 1% becomes sufficiently estranged from the rest of us that they become the troops of the economic 1%, who are “already so eager to call out the police to bully and arrest occupy movements in numerous cities across this once-great land”?

His solution: End all “wars of choice” whose goals are too nebulous and ephemeral to hold the attention of the general public.

Rest in peace, Joe Simon, who gave us Captain America.

A unique take on the nominating process comes from ex-senator and presidential wannabee Gary Hart:

The reason for the current confusion in the Republican nomination race has to do with the confused coalition the current party has become. It is now made up of a variety of factions that have no economic or social cement that holds them together.

Hart goes on to list them: “conservative Protestant evangelicals, neoconservative foreign policy and national security hawks, the Tea Party, much but not all of Wall Street, many of Main Street’s small business owners, libertarians and cultural conservatives”

Less important historically than who the eventual nominee will be is whether the nominating coalition proves strong enough to take over the national Republican party and control it for a number of elections and decades to come.

Why am I not surprised that President Obama and I like the same TV shows?

I got last week’s vocabulary term news desert, from Tom Stites. This week he elaborated in an article at the Nieman Journalism Lab. That was part of a 3-article series you can find here.

It’s time to remind you of my various holiday pieces: Midwinter recreates a pre-Christian winter solstice, and Carol at Christmas is one of my Mike DeSalvo stories. Ghosts of the Unitarian Christmas is my Dickens parody for UUs.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Hallelujah and other short notes

December 12, 2011 – 1:30 pm

Daily Kos’ Beverley Woods is calling for “Occupy carols” and gives a few examples. It’s tempting to try to compose some, but nothing is going to top this anti-corporate-personhood version of the Hallelujah Chorus:

Folks who claim that evolution baked selfishness into our animal nature should maybe think again: Even rats have empathy and will display altruism.

Kevin Drum calls attention to some major-league hypocrisy from the Mastercard/Visa monopoly. (Visa and Mastercard are technically separate companies, but they compete only through advertising.)

Background: The Dodd-Frank bill capped the fees that credit-card companies can charge merchants. In response, Visa/Mastercard stopped giving merchants a break on small transactions, with the result that merchants whose business is mainly small items have seen their fees go up instead of down.

The WSJ quotes a Mastercard executive: “There will be some unhappy parties, as there always is when the government gets in the way of the free-market system.” Drum responds:

The sheer gall on display here is just mind-boggling. If card companies were really interested in a free market, they’d remove the clause in their standard contract that prevents merchants from charging higher prices on credit and debit card transactions. Merchants would then be free to pass along swipe fees to their customers or not as they saw fit, and the free market would determine the outcome.

To Mastercard, “freedom” means that it is free to charge whatever it wants, and your local convenience store is free to go out of business if it doesn’t go along.

I say: Starve the beast. Bank at a credit union, find nearby ATMs where you can get cash for free, shop local whenever you can, and pay cash to your local merchants.

The Daily Show’s December 6 show takes on the Fox “War on Christmas” sham. In the opening monologue he describes the fake-outrage campaign against Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee for having a “tree lighting ceremony” rather than a “Christmas tree lighting ceremony”. And in the middle segment he demonstrates what a real declaration of war on Christmas would be like.

What makes Santa unique? Let’s consult a Venn diagram.

Jon Huntsman used to be the grown-up in the room when Republicans discussed science. No more.

Last week’s vocabulary term was news desert. Thursday Tom Stites elaborated in an article at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Bankers’ Law and other short notes

December 5, 2011 – 1:10 pm

The long-standing corrupt relationship between Wall Street, the SEC, and the Fed is starting to draw the attention it deserves. More on this next week, but here’s the short version of the recent major developments.

1.Last Monday, a federal judge refused to sign off on a settlement between the Securities Exchange Commission and Citigroup. As Judge Rakoff summarized the suit’s charge: “Citigroup created a fund that allowed it to dump some dubious assets on misinformed investors.” Citigroup made $160 million while the investors lost $700 million.

The SEC had negotiated a settlement under which Citi would pay a $285 million fine, but admit no wrongdoing. No one would go to jail and the settlement would be useless to investors suing to get their money back. The judge ruled that as long as the underlying facts of the case were still in dispute, he had no way to know whether the agreement was in the public interest or not. So the case is headed to trial.

If this ruling becomes an example to other judges, the implications are huge.

2. Massachusetts has filed suit against several major banks for wrongful foreclosures. The NYT says this diminishes the likelihood of a sweetheart deal “comprehensive settlement between the banks and federal and state officials to resolve foreclosure improprieties.”

3. It turns out that TARP was only a small part of the Wall Street bailout. The Federal Reserve also provided big banks with trillions in loans for essentially no interest. By investing that money — often in risk-free treasury bonds — the banks made $13 billion. There’s no meritocratic justification; anybody could have made that $13 billion. It’s better to laugh than cry, so I’ll let Jon Stewart tell the story:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

4. Finally, this doesn’t count as a major development, but one incensed Georgia judge’s rejection of a motion to dismiss a wrongful-foreclosure case makes good reading:

Clearly, U.S. Bank cannot take the [government’s] money, contract with our government to provide a service to the taxpayer, violate that agreement, and then say that no one on earth can sue them for it. That is not the law in Georgia.

Another story that I hope to have more time and space for next week: The National Defense Authorization Act authorizes the indefinite detention of “terrorists” without trial, possibly including American citizens. President Obama still has an opportunity to veto this, and he should.

It took me two weeks to realize I had missed National Feel-Like-an-Idiot Day. On Nov. 21, the New York Times released its list of the 100 notable books of 2011. I’ve read two.

Miniver Cheevy is concerned about his friends who have contracted Ron Paul Fever. This post is intended as a cure.

Fox Business Channel’s Eric Bolling watches the Muppet movie and comes away with this question: “Is liberal Hollywood using class warfare to brainwash our kids?” His guest blames Occupy Wall Street on the indoctrination today’s young adults got from Captain Planet.

Meanwhile, the New York Post describes Happy Feet 2 as “kiddie Karl Marx“.

TPM calls it a sign that the Perry campaign is “on the rocks”, but I find this new Rick Perry ad kind of endearing. The yeah-I-forget-things-but-so-what message might well appeal to the elderly, who are a disproportionate part of the Republican electorate.

So much for Herman Cain. He continues to deny that he harassed or had affairs with any of the women who accused him. But eventually it must have dawned on him that what he had already admitted was damning enough: He repeatedly gave money to a woman his wife had never heard of.

Here’s what makes me nervous: Whenever conservatives accuse liberals of doing something (no matter how ridiculous or unjustified the accusation is) you can be sure they’ll do it “back” to us at the first opportunity. Now they’re saying liberals recruited women to make fake sexual harassment charges against Cain. So that’s bound to happen to a Democrat — if not in 2012, 2014 at the latest.

The Romney campaign’s so-what response to the observation that its anti-Obama commercial is dishonest prompts NYT’s Thomas Edsall to give a recent history of legal-but-corrupt political practices, illustrating the pattern: “What was once considered sleazy becomes the norm.”

When an inexperienced farmer signs a complicated gas-drilling lease with a company that does this every day, who is likely to get the advantage? According to the NYT, gas leases often say more than the farmers realize.

Finally, I want to use the occasion of Barney Frank’s retirement announcement to once again denounce the zombie lie that somehow government regulations caused the housing bubble and the subsequent meltdown.

AlterNet’s Joshua Holland covers the details, but it comes down to two points:

1. “No bank was ever ‘forced’ – or coerced or incentivized by the government in any way – to make a bad loan.”

2. Forget “bad” loans, subprime loans, and so on — the entire mortgage market was only $1.4 trillion. If that was really the problem, TARP could easily have solved it by buying half of all the mortgages in the country.

No, the problem was the $140 trillion of unregulated financial instruments that Wall Street created out of those mortgages. Barney had nothing to do with that.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Where Occupy Goes Next and other short notes

November 28, 2011 – 1:18 pm

With winter coming and mayors prepared to unleash the police as ruthlessly as they can get away with, debate has turned to where the Occupy movement goes next.

Partly this is about constructing an agenda. (Michael Moore’s seems fairly typical.) But Glenn Greenwald writes:

I disagree with the prevailing wisdom that OWS should begin formulating specific legislative demands and working to elect specific candidates. I have no doubt that many OWS protesters will ultimately vote and even work for certain candidates — and that makes sense — but the U.S. desperately needs a citizen movement devoted to working outside of political and legal institutions and that is designed to be a place of dissent against it.

while Julian Sanchez disagrees:

protest, however vital as a consciousness raising tool, can only be a preparation for the more humdrum enterprise of convincing your neighbors with sustained arguments (or being convinced yourself), electing candidates, and all the rest. To imagine protest not as prologue to politics, but as a substitute for it, suggests a denial of the reality of pluralism, and an unwillingness to find out what democracy actually looks like.

Some Democratic politicians would like Occupy to raise enthusiasm for them the way that the Tea Party has for the Republicans, but movement activists are wary of being co-opted. Van Jones is recruiting (presumably Democratic) candidates “to run under this 99% banner“, provoking Occupy DC’s Kevin Zeese to write “Van Jones Can’t Occupy Us“.

Cenk Uygur has announced Wolf-PAC as a vehicle for pushing not candidates but issues like a constitutional amendment against corporate involvement in politics.

Mitt Romney’s first ad of this cycle quotes President Obama as saying: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

The problem: Obama was quoting a John McCain aide in 2008, not talking about his own 2012 campaign.

A Rick Perry ad quotes Obama as saying, “We’ve been a little bit lazy I think over the last couple of decades.” Perry replies: “That’s what our president thinks is wrong with America? That Americans have gotten lazy?”

And Romney piles on: “[Obama] said that Americans are lazy. I don’t think that describes Americans.”

The problem: Again, context. The fuller Obama quote makes it clear what he means: Previous administrations have been lazy about trying to attract overseas investment in the U.S., and he’s trying to correct that in his administration.

Well, if that’s how the game is played now, let’s play it. ThinkProgress assembles a collection of Mitt Romney “quotes”.

This speaks for itself:

And this (the world’s lightest material) is just cool:

Does it seem to you that conservatives have the advantage in the scurrilous-viral-email department? They do.

The U.C. Davis pepper-spraying cop has become an iconic image. A whole tumblr is devoted to photo-shopping him into all the other iconic images.

I’m becoming a fan of Noah Smith’s economic blog Noahpinion. This article raises an interesting thought: What if the values conservatives claim to love (hard work, individual responsibility, etc.) are promoted better by a liberal welfare state than by a conservative dog-eat-dog utopia?

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (5)

The Death of the Follow-up Question and other short notes

November 7, 2011 – 2:02 pm

Here’s the decline of journalism in one exchange: PBS’ Judy Woodruff is interviewing Herman Cain when he says the Chinese have:

indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

If you’re feeling generous, you can believe what Cain claimed later, that he meant that China was trying to develop a nuclear capability to rival ours. But the other possible interpretation was that Cain either didn’t know or got confused about the fact that China has had nuclear weapons since the 1960s — an appalling bit of ignorance in a presidential candidate.

Either way, it should be obvious to a trained reporter that some people were going to interpret Cain’s statement as ignorant (as they did). So whether an interviewer feels like nailing Cain or protecting him, his statement cries out for a follow-up question: “What do you mean by ‘develop nuclear capability’?”

But no. Follow-up questions are so 20th century. The 21st century interviewer just lets public figures blather and moves on, so Woodruff’s next question is about Cain’s position in the polls.

If you care about food-quality issues, you should be reading Bruce Bradley’s blog. Bradley is a self-described “food industry insider” (Pillsbury, General Mills, Nabisco) who now is trying to tell the rest of us what the food industry is doing.

He has a down-to-earth manner that comes through nicely in this demonstration of what’s wrong with processed tomatoes. Basically, after you process all the flavor out of a tomato, you have to add a bunch of garbage to make it taste like something.

You know those climate-change “alarmists”, the ones who exaggerate everything and make off-the-wall predictions? Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

Well, CO2 emissions in 2010 turned out to be higher than the worst-case scenario in IPCC’s 2007 report.

Joe Walsh was the only Illinois congressman to get the Family Research Council’s “True Blue” rating for his “unwavering support of the family”. The irony: He doesn’t support his own family. He’s more than $100,000 behind on his child support payments.

Two women’s stunning encounter with starlings

Dilbert creator Scott Adams is only sort of joking when he asks: What if Government Were More Like an iPod? His specific suggestions for reform are mostly unworkable, some of them intentionally ridiculous. But I think he’s got the framing right:

I like to think of the government as a big, complicated machine. We citizens are the users. What we’ve always lacked is a well-designed user interface.

The vote to watch in tomorrow night’s election returns is the Issue 2 referendum in Ohio. Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature passed SB-5, a union-busting bill similar to the one that started the demonstrations in Wisconsin last spring. Issue 2 puts SB-5 up to popular vote. Polls show a significant majority for repeal.

It’s been 20 years since Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive. At the time, not many people thought he’d be around to celebrate the anniversary.

Who’s to blame for the filibuster making the Senate unmanageable? A simple chart explains: When Democrats are in the minority, they filibuster about as much as the previous Republican minority. When Republicans are in the minority, they take filibustering to whole new level.

What do past elections predict about 2012? Nate Silver is the ideal person to answer that question: Obama is vulnerable, but any perception of an improving economy could save him. Or the Republicans could save him by nominating anybody other than Romney.

And by the way, Obama still has a huge advantage among younger voters. The whole election will come down to how many of them vote.

An electrical engineer explains the importance of the smart grid, an electrical system that can interact with your appliances rather than just fulfill their demands for power. Short version: What power companies do is match supply to demand. The power source that’s easiest to adjust to changing demand is natural gas as opposed to oil, coal, nuclear, or any of the green sources. And more and more, natural gas means fracking. But a smart grid could adjust demand quickly, making gas a less vital part of the system.

As wind becomes a more important electricity source, power surges become a problem to manage. Another way to add flexibility to the power system is to let utilities store excess power in your water heater or some other heat sink.

If you set up your tripod and get an entire thunderstorm on one photo, it looks like this:

By weeklysift | Comments (1)