The Weekly Sift

In This Week’s Sift:

• One Obama-Week. Compared to that vacation-happy white guy, this Obama fellow seems to work pretty hard.
• Why the Banks Are Bankrupt. Wired claims that the Wall-Street disaster comes from mis-applying a mathematical formula. It’s the best theory I’ve heard so far.
• Kindle and the Conquest of Space. Will a new book-reader change my life? Or at least let me stay in my apartment? And what about online comic books?
• Short Notes. Maybe Santelli’s rant wasn’t so spontaneous. None-the-Wiser Pence calls for a spending freeze. Colbert King wonders about the other missing people. Lakoff interprets Obama. Maybe Canada knows what it’s doing. And why should Obama get a poster and not you? Or me?

If you’re geeky, the reason it told them that is kind of interesting. First, the formula treated correlation as a constant, and second, it provided a way to read that constant off of a market price, rather than from an intrinsic analysis of the risks. For example, consider two mortgages, one in San Francisco and another in Miami. What’s the risk that they both default at the same time? It turns out that a certain credit default swap market had implicitly been estimating that risk for about twenty years. So without knowing anything about real estate or about San Francisco or Miami, you could pull that number out of market data.

Here’s what went wrong: The correlation between the two risks isn’t a constant; it depends on events. And just because there hadn’t been any nationwide real estate crashes during the last twenty years, that didn’t mean such a thing couldn’t happen. So when a nationwide real estate crash started, suddenly the risks were highly correlated, even though the misapplied formula had said they couldn’t be.

So, in short, it’s another example of that old computer programming adage: Constants aren’t. Variables don’t. [Translation from the Geekish: Just because you represent some quantity with a constant or a variable, that doesn’t mean that it actually stays constant or actually varies. You’ve got to match your data types to the world, not vice versa.]

I’m a big fan of the downtown-apartment-in-a-small-city lifestyle. Our heating bills are low and we can walk to many of the restaurants, bars, and shops that other people have to drive to. But a middle-aged couple in an apartment constantly struggles for space. Unused stuff has to go. For us, the church rummage sale is the culmination of a rigorous annual culling process.

My biggest space problem is that — thirty years later — I still collect the stuff I collected as a student: music, books, and comic books. Thirty years worth. So while my comic books used to fit comfortably in a stack on a shelf in the dorm, now they take up more than half a dozen of those long comic-book-store boxes. And books — the last time we moved we finally gave up on the idea of displaying our books attractively on shelves. They live in boxes that are indexed in a database. Almost fifty of them, at last count. Even a three-bedroom apartment is hard-pressed to contain them.

MP3 and iTunes solved the music problem. This month I’ve embarked on a couple of experiments to see if there’s a similar solution for books and comics: I subscribed to Marvel’s online repository of digital comics and I bought a Kindle from Amazon. Both still feel like new toys, so it’s too soon to say if they’ll totally solve the problem. But so far, so good.

Marvel. The economics of digital comics are great: A typical paper-and-ink comic costs $3, while an annual subscription to Marvel’s web site costs $60, so if it stops me from buying two comics a month, it’s a win.

Marvel solves the file-sharing problem like this: Instead of letting you share a copy with infinitely many friends, your browser downloads the comic you’re reading (so it doesn’t blink out if you suddenly lose your internet connection), but throws it away when you’re done. Doubtlessly some hacker has a way to retain the files, but I don’t want to go there. If (like me) you only read comics in places with an internet connection (like home), it works fine.

Before signing up, I worried about the reading experience, but I’m happy with it. (You can check out some free online comics here.) Those rare two-page spreads are a little hard to grok, but on the whole I think comic art looks better on a computer screen than on paper. Superheroes want to be bright.

My main complaint is the incompleteness of the collection and the lag behind what’s in the stores (about six months, similar to the trade paperback versions of comics). In the first few days after subscribing I zoomed through all 30 issues of 4, a limited Fantastic Four series from a few years back. But there are still frustrating gaps in the collection, which Marvel seems to be trying to fill in.

Now if only DC will imitate them.

Kindle. My Kindle 2 book reader arrived Friday.

The first objection everybody makes to the idea of an electronic book-reader is that they can’t imagine staring at a screen long enough to read a whole book. I just finished reading my first book (Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side — more about that next week) on the Kindle and I can report that it’s not a problem. The Kindle’s screen is like a high-tech Etch-a-Sketch. The little dark particles re-arrange themselves electronically, but nothing on the screen glows. You read it with ambient light, just like a book. Plus, the Kindle is easier to one-hand than a book, because it’s light and isn’t constantly trying to shut itself. I think it’s a pleasant experience.

The convenience is amazing. It’s bigger than a phone, but fits in a large jacket pocket. So Saturday I was able to take the Kindle out for a night on the town without anybody noticing. During intermission, I could read Mayer’s account of extraordinary rendition instead of the ads in the theater program.

You buy books from Amazon, which the Kindle connects to wirelessly, wherever cell phones work. I thought it would be a financial hazzard to live in a virtual bookstore, able to buy books anywhere at any time. But in fact I think it will work the other way. If books are available 24/7 and you can start reading one a minute after you order, there’s no reason to buy a book until the instant you’re ready to start reading it. So much for my stack of I’ll-get-to-that-someday books.

Looking at the last fifty books I’ve read — yes, I have a list, that’s the kind of guy I am — about half of them were available for Kindle. Prices are similar to paperbacks, even if the book is new. (Mayer’s book cost me $9.99.) Out-of-copyright classics are ridiculously cheap: the collected 200 works of Charles Dickens go for less than $5 total. (But I’m not ready to start reading them right away, so I haven’t pulled the trigger on that purchase yet.) I picked up a Bible for free.

There are provisions for highlighting, saving quotes, making notes — and downloading it all onto your computer. You can make the type any size, click on any word to get its definition, or look up any subject in the Wikipedia. It will hold and play MP3s, but that’s an afterthought — Amazon didn’t give it a good music-player interface. The 1,500-book (1.5GB) capacity is an illusion; it’s essentially infinite. Because Amazon keeps track of what you’ve bought, you can purge something from your Kindle and restore it later for free (with all your highlights and notes still in it, they claim). You can email text files to Amazon, and they’ll convert them to Kindle format for you. The converted pages don’t come out looking as good as the e-books you buy, but they’re adequate.

Will the Kindle completely replace paper in my life? No. But I think that’s a silly standard to judge it by. In addition to the books, magazines, and newspapers you just can’t get on the Kindle, you can’t loan Kindle-files to your friends, and you can’t borrow them from the library. Paper books will continue to have their place. I’ll just have fewer of them.

Given that I already have paper versions of all the classics I really want, cheap e-books won’t make up for the Kindle’s $350 cost anytime soon. (For a college student, they might.) But given that I rent a storage locker and don’t want to rent a bigger one, it’s worth money to me to own fewer physical objects. That, and the sheer coolness of carrying 1,500 books with me to the coffee shop.

Indiana Republican Congressman Mike Pence knows just what to do in these times when nobody but the government is spending: “Freeze federal spending immediately!” I’m speechless.

Friday, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine (describing themselves as “veteran Russia reporters” who “spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape”) charged on Playboy’s web site that Santelli’s rant

was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America

For now, their article suggests and implies more than it proves. But re-watching Santelli in the light of their theory, everything looks different. His gestures seem practiced, his phrases a little too clever. It will be interesting to see if this story develops as more people look into it.

In This Week’s Sift:

• Myths. The stimulus lets government overrule your doctor, $30 million for mice, the unpopularity of investigating Bush, and the plot to get Rush off the air. Those are just a few of the baseless assertions that pass for facts these days.
• Republican Watch: Newt’s Energy Policy. It sounds great, but it boils down to oil and nuclear.
• Some Brains Should Drain. Even the Obama administration is being taken in by the Wall Street brain-drain fear. But I just can’t credit the idea that the architects of the current mess have a better job waiting somewhere else.
• Short Notes. Porn star for Senate. Take your gun to church. Blackwater is no more. Planned Parenthood thanks Sarah Palin. Deregulation restores your right to have salmonella in your peanut butter. And more.
  

The Right has gotten very good at introducing false “facts” into the public debate. Typically, one of these “facts” begins its life in a memo or an email at some think tank or Republican congressional office. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Matt Drudge release it into the wild, where it gets repeated by Fox News and major Republican politicians. At that point, it’s “news” and starts showing up on CNN and the broadcast networks. Once it gets that far, usually the best you can hope for is that it gets reported as a “controversy” rather than a fact. (“Next, our panel of experts debates whether up is down.”) The major networks have such a fetish about “balance” that they will never come out and say “This is just false.”

A common technique here is the “refused to rule out” story. Liberals are plotting to do something unless they rule it out to the satisfaction of conservatives, who will refuse to be satisfied.

Anyway, here’s a sampling of recent myths.

Stimulus Myths. When the Republicans decided to go all-out against the stimulus bill (it passed with the support of three Republican senators and no Republicans in the House), they started telling horror stories about the specific programs “hidden” in the bill.

I have to conclude that the Democrats did a pretty good job of combing silly programs out of the stimulus, because the Republicans were quickly reduced to making stuff up. (A good summary of what is really in the bill is here.) The stimulus bill produced an amazing collection of mythology, almost all of which found its way into this single speech by Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia. I’ll limit myself to two myths:

The government will overrule your doctor. This one started with an article by Betsy McCaughey, former Republican lieutenant governor of New York who now works at the conservative Hudson Institute.

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective.

McCaughey then made a tour of the cable talk shows, repeating the point that the Democrats had hidden a Big-Brotherish takeover of medical decision-making in the stimulus bill.

This is such a misreading of the text that it almost has to be intentional. It’s got the information flow backwards: the system is supposed to make information easily available to your doctor, not to make your doctor’s decisions easily reversible by the government. (Also, it’s not a new bureaucracy; it was established by the Bush administration in 2004.)

CNN’s medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen asked McCaughey to show her where the bill does what she claims, and came to the conclusion that it “doesn’t exactly say that”. When challenged, McCaughey retreated to the position that the bill’s language “could allow” what she describes — in other words, the bill doesn’t rule it out to her satisfaction.

The Wonk Room observes that McCaughey played a similar role — cherry picking phrases out of a bill and making them sound alarming — in the campaign against the Clinton health plan in the 1990s. Keith Olbermann notes that the Hudson Institute has funding from drug companies. McCaughey’s response to Olbermann doesn’t deny that, but claims that her position at Hudson is unpaid.

Pelosi’s mouse. Many, many Republican congresspeople (Congress Matters quotes 18 of them) told this story: The stimulus bill contained $30 million for “Pelosi’s mouse” — the salt marsh mouse, which has a habitat in Nancy Pelosi’s district in California.

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line has the real story: It starts with an email circulated by the staff of the Republican House leadership, claiming that people at an unnamed federal agency had told them they would spend $30 million of their stimulus money on “wetland restoration in the San Francisco Bay Area — including work to protect the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.”

The Republicans have not revealed the names of the people they talked to, the agency, what line in the bill produces the $30 million, or how much of the alleged $30 million is directly devoted to the mouse habitat.

“There are no federal wetland restoration projects in line to get funded in San Francisco,” Pelosi spkesperson Drew Hammill said. “Neither the Speaker nor her staff have had any involvement in this initiative. The idea that $30 million will be spent to save mice is a total fabrication.”

The American people don’t want to see Bush investigated. We hear this over and over again from political pundits who think their own affection for people like Karl Rove is shared by the public. But then pesky data starts to show up. Gallup polled the public about three issues: politicizing the Justice Department, spying on Americans illegally, and torture. In each case, the plurality (from 38% to 41%) was for a criminal investigation and another 24-30% wanted an investigation by an independent panel, making 62-71% favoring some kind of investigation.

Interestingly, rather than headlining this poll “2/3rds of Americans want Bush investigated,” Gallup decided to lump the independent-investigation folks together with the don’t-investigate folks and headlined the piece: “No mandate for criminal probes of Bush administration“. That’s your “liberal media” at work.

Democrats are planning to destroy conservative talk radio by bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine is an FCC policy that was thrown out by the Reagan administration. It said that federally licensed TV and radio stations (i.e., not cable or internet) had to present controversial issues in a balanced way. If reinstated, it might require radio stations that carry Rush Limbaugh to balance his show with a liberal show. Some stations might decide it was easier just to drop Rush.

Unless you pay attention to talk radio or other conservative media, you probably have heard nothing about the attempt to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. That’s because there is no attempt. There is no pending legislation, other than a Republican bill to strip the FCC of the power to reinstitute a Fairness Doctrine. (Democrats who don’t support that Republican bill are refusing to rule out the Fairness Doctrine. Those schemers!) During the campaign Obama said he did not support the Fairness Doctrine. None of the major liberal media-watch organizations is pushing for it. It’s got zero support on the liberal blogs. (We love Rush. We want to make him the poster boy for the Republican Party.)

But this issue is a bugaboo on the right, where they talk about it at great length and interpret every Democratic head-fake as the start of a major campaign. (I think they expect us to do it because they would if the situation were reversed.) Typical is this article from the conservative Gateway Pundit, which accuses liberal Media Matters of pushing the Fairness Doctrine. But the link supporting that claim is just an article criticizing conservative talk radio; the Fairness Doctrine is not mentioned. Or this one from conservative NewsBusters, where a Huffington Post article laughing at conservative paranoia about the Fairness Doctrine is interpreted as part of the plot to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Most recently, Politico over-interpreted David Axelrod. When Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Axelrod if he would “rule out reimposing the Fairness Doctrine”, Axelrod refused to announce policy over the head of the new FCC chair. (It looks like this is one of the operating procedures of the Obama White House, and the media is having trouble adjusting to it. Policy announcements more often come from the experts lower in the administration, and top White House people — including Obama — are discouraged from anticipating what they will say.) Politico’s Michael Calderone thought Axelrod’s non-statement was worth writing an article about, because he didn’t rule anything out.

Newt Gingrich in the Moonie Times wants to end “Bush-Obama” big government policies and instead stimulate the economy by tax cuts, including “Rep. Paul D. Ryan’s proposal to eliminate the capital-gains tax.”

It’s fascinating to watch conservatives distance themselves from the unpopular word Bush, while continuing to promote tax cuts for rich people and all the other Bush policies. Did any of them say a word against President Bush in 2002-2003 when he was popular? Did any of them propose policies different from Bush when they ran in 2006 and 2008? Not that I noticed. But the word Bush — they’ve totally distanced themselves from it. Us big-government liberals are responsible for Bush now.

Newt goes on to say that his American Solutions think tank will soon produce an energy policy

that will turn American energy assets (including clean coal, ethanol, more production of oil and natural gas, new technologies from hydrogen to wind and solar and a vastly expanded nuclear-power program, as well as a dramatic modernization of the electric grid and an expansion of conservation) into money that stays here at home.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except:

• No one has any idea what “clean coal” is. Perpetual-motion machines sound good too, but that doesn’t mean we know how to make them.
• Ethanol (at least the corn-based kind we’ve been producing) requires so much energy to produce that the energy gain is minimal. Remember Granny Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies making corn moonshine by cooking something in her still? Scale that up and you start to understand where ethanol comes from.
• Hydrogen is a method for transporting and delivering energy, not an energy source. There’s no hydrogen well that you can stick a pipe into. Instead, you need to use energy to produce hydrogen; then you move the hydrogen somewhere and burn it to get back slightly less energy than you put in.
• “More production of oil and gas” is the whole drill-baby-drill thing from Sarah Palin’s campaign. You can drill all you want, but the world’s remaining oil and gas — if you could burn it all without cooking the planet — is almost all somewhere else.
• “new technologies” like wind and solar, and “a dramatic modernization of the electric grid and an expansion of conservation” is some of that wasteful spending that Republicans hated in the stimulus bill. When conservative flagship National Review listed “50 of the most outrageous items in the stimulus package” they denounced “money-losing technologies that have not proven cost-efficient despite decades of government support” (presumably wind and solar energy) and “programs [that] would spend lavishly on technologies that are proven failures.” Also included among their “outrages” were the $4.5 billion for the grid, the $6.2 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program (conservation), and a number of other programs they described as “green sugar”.

So Newt’s list boils down to this: flim-flam, more subsidies for Big Oil, stuff Republicans overwhelmingly voted down when it was actually proposed, and “a vastly expanded nuclear-power program.”

I wonder why he didn’t just say that?

The key, says Brimelow, is for the party to recognize that white people are its base. McCain beat Obama 55-45 among whites, and if he could have captured Ronald Reagan’s 65% of the white vote, he’d be president. Yes, the non-white portion of the electorate is going up, but look at Alabama:

[In] Alabama, like the South in general, whites are only 65 percent of the electorate, whereas in the US at large they cast about 77% of the vote. So the GOP is in much worse shape in Alabama than in America generally. But still the GOP won overwhelmingly in Alabama—because it got 88 percent of the white vote in this last election.

Yep, that’s the message Republicans should be pushing: White people, unite! Today Alabama, tomorrow the USA! Brimelow continues:

I think that whites, that is to say Americans, will organize. They will ultimately throw off the leadership they currently have. I think immigration will become an issue, and the issue will become an important part of that self-organization process, with your help

If this works, maybe we should recruit some dominatrix types to run against the senators who support torture.

A 64-year-old diabetic veteran describes the nitty-gritty of getting healthcare from the Veterans’ Administration. It’s not a horror story and nothing awful happens to him, but in some ways the very ordinariness of his account makes it worse. I can easily imagine millions of people dealing with this kind of hassle and expense on a regular basis.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America.

In this week’s Sift … the theme is partisanship. Barack Obama became famous by calling on America to unite and rise above it. In a campaign based on hope and change, that was perhaps the change that Americans hoped for most, the one that made Obama president. Is there any chance he can deliver on it?

• The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. In addition to being the best explanation of the partisan divide that I’ve seen, it’s a fascinating retelling of the tumultuous period between Johnson’s Democratic landslide in 1964 and Nixon’s Republican landslide in 1972.
• Two Weeks. That’s how long it has been since George Bush’s last day as president. A brief recap of what we’ve seen since then.
• Obama Chooses His Opponent Carefully: Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh is emerging as the voice and face of the Republican Party. But that’s because the Democrats are choosing him, and the Republicans can’t afford to offend his audience.
• Short Notes. Rachel Maddow has no TV. The credit crunch of 33 AD. Blaming God for a Super Bowl loss. And talent appears off the beaten path.

… look for Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. Perlstein’s key insight is that the rift between Red America and Blue America begins with Richard Nixon. In the Johnson-over-Goldwater landslide of 1964, America seemed to have reached consensus around an idealistic liberal agenda: end poverty, rebuild the cities, give Negroes the full rights of citizenship, and much more. A mere eight years later, Nixon’s landslide re-election over McGovern exploited a broad-based resentment of all the groups who supported or benefited from that agenda: liberals, blacks, intellectuals, peaceniks, hippies, feminists, and anyone else whose patriotism was considered suspect. Nixonland is the story of those eight years.

The title is significant and well-chosen. The book isn’t called Nixon, because while Nixon is at the center of this change, the book isn’t really about him. It’s about Nixonland, which Perlstein defines as: “the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans.” The word itself was coined during the 1956 campaign, when Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote speeches for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson:

In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; this is the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

One event from Nixon’s college days provides a metaphor that stretches throughout the book. When Nixon arrived, Whittier College politics was dominated by an in-group known as the Franklins. Nixon became class president by establishing an out-group, the Orthogonians (literally at a right angle to the in-group), and cashing in on their resentment of the Franklins.

The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under the social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous strategy, is to concentrate on the nonspectacular — silent — majority.

Nixonland is the extension of this insight from Whittier to all of America. To pull it off, Nixon needed to properly identify America’s Franklins. He did, and his insight sticks today: The resented Franklins are not the rich (like John McCain) or well-born (like George W. Bush), but rather the sophisticated — the people with silver tongues and Harvard degrees (like Barack Obama). The Franklins are people who think they know better than you, people who make you feel ignorant or stupid. They’re elitists. They’re celebrities. Orthogonians, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of book-knowledge or the kind of experience that comes from foreign travel or from learning other languages and cultures. But they have small-town values. They’re hockey moms. Their good hearts (not their legal expertise) qualify them for the Supreme Court.

Resentment against the sophisticated Franklins has been carefully cultivated ever since, and was on display often during the fall campaign.

Nixon’s diabolical cleverness was matched by liberal blindness. One blind spot was about Nixon himself: Liberals had to admit that some people agreed with Nixon, but still couldn’t believe that anyone liked Nixon. (There’s a similar Palin blind spot today.) But the more serious blind spot was this:

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble — whether instituting open housing, civilian complaint review boards, or sex education programs — when they presume that a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. It is then that they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.

They/we are too quick to assume that all intelligent well-informed people will see that they/we are right, and that no one else matters. The no-one-else-matters part is a fat pitch that Nixons have been hitting out of the park for almost half a century. Another lesson of the sixties is that liberals do not understand working-class patriotism. Americans identify with their country and will resist anyone who seems to be attacking it. Bad news about America — whether it’s My Lai or Abu Ghraib — has to be presented carefully, sadly rather than angrily. The perpetrators of such atrocities are an us, not a them.

Nixon’s insight crystallized when New York construction workers attacked an anti-war demonstration in 1969. Organized labor had been a key component of the Democratic coalition, and Republicans could not afford to alienate their corporate backers by appealing to workers’ economic interests. But if the white working class might vote on identity issues — short-hairs vs. long-hairs, pro-American workers vs. anti-American hippies and intellectuals — then economic appeals wouldn’t be necessary. That in a nutshell is the red/blue divide.

Violence is another of the book’s running themes. The sixties are remembered largely for left-wing violence, but Perlstein carefully documents the much more pervasive right-wing violence. Left-wing violence had a man-bites-dog quality that made it newsworthy. But the race riots, for example, were usually touched off by some egregious example of the everyday police abuse that was taken for granted in that era. One of the later Watts riots began when a black man was stopped for speeding and killed in front of his wife because he argued too vociferously. The speeding and arguing had a simple explanation: the wife was in labor and Watts had no hospital. White-on-black violence was often provoked by an “aggressive” act like moving into a white neighborhood or sending a child to a white school. The Walker Commission later characterized the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention as a “police riot“. Nonetheless, the “law and order” theme that developed was conservative code for cracking down on blacks and peaceniks, not on police, lynch mobs, or construction workers — much less on state governments that defied the law’s promise of equal protection for citizens of all races.

Perlstein himself (born in 1969) has no personal memories of this era, but his book is steeped not just in the political history, but the social history as well. Apparently he has paged through every relevant copy of Life, watched all the movies, and listened to all the songs. (Occasionally, as George Will’s review notes, he gets something wrong. Straw Dogs, for example, was not a western.) For someone who did live through the era — I had just turned 7 when JFK was assassinated and had a precocious interest in politics — the book provides a continuous shock of recognition. It’s easy to forget how many events got packed into a small space, and even today the memories still come with a soundtrack: Vietnam (both pro and con), the Summer of Love, the King and Kennedy assassinations, Woodstock, antiwar demonstrations, Kent State, the Chicago 7 trial, the backlash against it all, and much, much more.

The question Perlstein never answers is: How can we leave Nixonland? That seems to me to be the key question of the Obama administration. Will further attempts to polarize America start to fall flat now? Or will we just run the script again, with a new generation of Franklins telling a new generation of Orthogonians that their country is bad, and that their feelings and beliefs and opinions don’t matter, because the facts (if they would only bother to learn them) are on our side?

Right now the focus in on the stimulus bill, which (despite many compromises) got zero Republican votes in the House, but passed anyway. Basically, the debate comes down to this: Democrats want to stimulate by having the government spend money; Republicans want to stimulate by cutting taxes, particularly rich people’s taxes (because we haven’t been trying that already for eight years).

The Republican plan is based on supply-side economics, which boils down to the idea that lower taxes motivate people to try harder to make money. The problem with this theory is easy to explain: Economics has two main motivators — greed and fear. Booms are dominated by greed; busts by fear. Supply-side economics is greed-based economics, and it describes pretty well how an economy will behave during a boom: Investors and entrepreneurs are just dying to buy more stocks and start more businesses, so if you give them an extra dollar, they’ll use it as collateral to borrow three more and invest it in something.

But in a bust, supply-side economics doesn’t work at all, because fear is dominant. Investors aren’t even trying to make money, really. They’re just trying not to lose their shirts. Cut the capital gains tax and most of them will say, “Blast from the past! I remember capital gains.”

That’s why the studies Republicans cite now to support a tax cut are all inverted in one way or another. The study shows, say, that raising taxes costs the economy jobs — so they draw the conclusion that cutting taxes will create jobs in an equal and opposite way. Hidden in that mirror-image reasoning is the assumption that greed will magically replace fear. But it won’t. Fearful people will sit on their tax cut, and do nothing to stimulate the economy.

In this period where the Republican Party seems rudderless and faceless, Democrats are happily promoting Rush Limbaugh as the opposition’s true leader. It’s a little like what the Republicans tried to do with Michael Moore a few years back. Obama himself kicked it off January 23rd. In addition to a number of carrots, Obama’s plea for congressional bipartisanship on the stimulus bill contained this hint of a stick: “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

Limbaugh, naturally, is doing what he does, saying things like: “We are being told that we have to hope [Obama] succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.” And: “So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail.”

The American people are (justifiably) scared right now, and most of us don’t want to hear stuff like this. So Republican Congressman Phil Gingrey tried to distance himself from it, telling Politico: “it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party.” But the next day “because of the high volume of phone calls and correspondence received by my office since the Politico article ran” he had to back down: “I see eye-to-eye with Rush Limbaugh … Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and other conservative giants are the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience.”

I don’t remember Michael Moore getting any similar apologies. Maybe Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party.

Now, after House Republicans voted 177-0 against the stimulus bill (and Fox News gave Limbaugh credit), Americans United for Change has upped the ante a little: They’re running ads targeting Republican senators: “Will Senator ____ side with Limbaugh too? … or will he reject the partisanship and failed economic policies of the past, and stand up for the people of ____.“

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker interprets all this as Obama taking Limbaugh’s bait, and warns: “Never let rabble-rousers get under your skin — especially those whose popularity in some circles compares favorably with your own and whose earnings make bailed-out bank presidents envious.”

But Obama knows exactly what he’s doing. The “some circles” where Limbaugh is more popular than Obama are all on the far right. The secret of Republican success the last few decades has been to court these extremists in ways that the general populace wouldn’t see. But if Limbaugh becomes the face of the Republican Party nationally, they will lose big — and they know it.

The lesson here is that Obama realizes he can’t just unilaterally disarm in the red/blue wars. It remains to be seen whether he can wind the battle down. The Limbaugh gambit isn’t a direct attack on Republicans, it’s a shot across the bow. “Don’t go there,” he’s warning them. But what if they do anyway?

Young people won’t remember, but this kind of remark was actually considered a clever comeback around 1970, when the patriarchs figured that the Women’s Liberation fad would burn itself out before long. They were sure that (deep down) successful women like Joan Walsh really wanted to trade it all to marry powerful men like Dick Armey. Pointing out that this dream could never come true was supposed to be devastating. (Walsh seems strikingly undevastated.)

We’re a country comprised of human beings that the Democrat Party and the left have attempted to arrange into groups of victims, and that’s who [Obama] appeals to … You put people into groups then you victimize them and give the victims power over the majority because they, they have grievances that … have been made up, and the majority gets cowed into fear because they don’t want to be complained at.

So, America, don’t be cowed. Join Rush and strike back at those so-called “victims” and their made-up grievances.

It’s no big secret that I’m a Rachel Maddow fan. I love the interview that 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl did with her. Especially this part:

LESLEY: I have to ask you something that is apropos of absolutely nothing. But I did hear that you do not own a television set. It’s true, right?
RACHEL: Yes.
LESLEY: Yes. So before we get very far, I want to ask you if you have the foggiest idea who the hell I am.
RACHEL: I’ve Googled you extensively. Don’t worry.

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer has started a worthwhile series: The Bogus Trend of the Week.

Trend might be the most abused word in journalism. To write a typical trend-story, all you really need is one event to serve as an example, a just-so story about why this might happen a lot these days, and then some hand-wringing (or hopeful, if the trend is positive) quotes from people who claim to be be affected.

The tell-tale mark of a bogus trend story is the absence of meaningful statistics. As any fan of the TV series Numbers knows, we live in such a measured and quantified society that any trend worth writing about has to produce some statistics somewhere. We are snowed under by statistics. To steal an image from baseball stat-guru Bill James, believing in an important trend that produces no numbers is like believing that elephants have been dancing in that snow without leaving tracks.

Anyway, here are two samples of Shafer’s bogus trends:

• The recession is increasing church attendance. The NYT says so, but they don’t talk to the guy at Gallup who studies precisely this subject. He doesn’t see it in the numbers.
• Teens are getting increasingly involved with explosives. CBS reports this, but it turns out — I could have told you this — that young guys have always liked to blow things up. (Given an excuse to set one off, middle-aged guys love explosions too.) The trend is actually down, not up.

So far the bogus trends haven’t been earth-shakers, but Shafer may help you join the trend towards increased reader-and-viewer skepticism regarding stories the media creates out of nothing.

You had to wonder how long it would take for Bush-administration officials to flip from arguing for the supremacy of the Republican executive branch to sounding the alarm about the dangers of an imperial Democratic presidency. I was naive enough to think they’d wait until the inauguration. But no.

In a January 4 NYT op-ed, John Bolton and John Yoo write that we should “strike the proper balance between the executive and legislative branches” by making sure that any international agreements Obama makes go through the formal treaty process, requiring a 2/3 ratification by the Senate — a supermajority that allows any 34 of the 41 Republican senators to block whatever they don’t like.

The Constitution’s Treaty Clause has long been seen, rightly, as a bulwark against presidential inclinations to lock the United States into unwise foreign commitments.

If Yoo ever reminded President Bush about the constitutional limits on presidential power, the incident was not recorded. Instead, he wrote the famous torture memos, in which he argued that a treaty duly signed by the United States and ratified by the Senate — the Convention Against Torture (CAT) — was essentially meaningless. Under his constitutional power as commander-in-chief, Yoo claimed, the president can order torture without notifying either the Senate or the countries we made the treaty with.

Any presidential decision to order interrogations methods that are inconsistent with CAT would amount to a suspension or termination of those treaty provisions.

But the president was a Republican then, so the Constitution meant something completely different. Now Bolton and Yoo worry that Obama will commit the US to the Kyoto agreements against global warming, to the International Criminal Court, or to other agreements that subordinate America to international law. (Yoo ought to worry. If the US were subject to the ICC, he could find himself on trial there for his role in the Bush administration’s war crimes. It’s shameful that the Times presents Yoo as if he were a disinterested observer when he clearly is not.) Obama might attempt this purely by executive agreement, or by executive agreement supported by a majority-vote congressional resolution rather than a 2/3 Senate ratification.

This has been done in the past by Republican presidents, or by Democrats with Republican support (like Bill Clinton and the NAFTA agreement). But of course there’s a difference:

It is true that some multinational economic agreements, like Bretton Woods, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect after approval by majorities of Congress rather than two-thirds of the Senate. But international agreements that go beyond the rules of international trade and finance — that involve significant national-security commitments, or that purport to delegate lawmaking and enforcement functions to international organizations, or that could fundamentally alter the American constitutional system of individual rights — should receive the intense scrutiny of the treaty process, regardless of their policy merits.

A few objections:

1. The Constitution never mentions a distinction between economic and national-security agreements.
2. Our trade agreements surrender sovereignty to international organizations (like the WTO) just as much as national-security agreements do.
3. The most outrageous abrogation of Congress’ role in treaties — the status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) that the Bush adminstration just signed with Iraq — goes completely unmentioned. The SOFA required extensive parliamentary debate in Baghdad. But (according to former Reagan deputy attorney general Bruce Fein)

Bush promulgated the SOFA unilaterally as an executive agreement. He neither sought nor received congressional ratification. … The enormously important international military pact was a unilateral diktat of the president, similar to the treaty-making power of British monarchs circa 1776.

But never mind. The SOFA happened before Obama’s historical inauguration, which will completely change the meaning of the Constitution — for some people, anyway.

Dianne Feinstein got a lot of attention by announcing that Obama didn’t consult her before nominating Leon Panetta to head the CIA, and that she’d rather have an intelligence professional for the job.

Other than Rachel Maddow, the mainstream media did a bad job of presenting the subtext of this conflict: Feinstein, like Jay Rockefeller and some other high-ranking Democrats, is tainted by the the Bush administration’s crimes. They didn’t torture anybody or tap any phones, but as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they got enough information to know that illegal things were happening.

Nobody was in a better position to blow the whistle. Yes, the programs were classified, but Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution forbids prosecuting members of Congress for anything they say on the floor: “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” But they did nothing. They went along. That’s why DiFi and Jello Jay (nicknames I didn’t make up) want the CIA headed by “an intelligence professional” — someone who is similarly tainted, in other words.

One reason Dick Cheney is so certain he’ll never be brought to justice is that a full accounting of the last eight years would make a lot of Democrats look bad as well. Cheney et al assume there will be a gentlemen’s agreement not to look under too many rocks. In other words, mistakes were made, but no purpose would be served by spelling out what those mistakes were or who made them. (A Wall Street Journal editorial lays out this you’ll-go-down-with-us case.)

That’s a popular point of view in the establishment Village. Whether or not such a gentlemen’s agreement will stick is going to be one of the defining conflicts of the Obama administration. Virtually by definition, most of that conflict is going to take place out of the spotlight.

In contrast to the Feinsteins and Rockefellers, some people with a lot more at risk really did blow the whistle, and they’re paying the price. Newsweek tells the story of Thomas Tamm, the guy who told the New York Times about warrantless wiretapping.

The FBI has pursued him relentlessly for the past two and a half years. Agents have raided his house, hauled away personal possessions and grilled his wife, a teenage daughter and a grown son. More recently, they’ve been questioning Tamm’s friends and associates about nearly every aspect of his life. Tamm has resisted pressure to plead to a felony for divulging classified information. But he is living under a pall, never sure if or when federal agents might arrest him.

Glenn Greenwald comments at length. Fellow whistle-blower Jesselyn Radack wonders

how many taxpayer dollars have been spent “investigating” me, Tom Tamm, Sibel Edmonds and so many others who were simply trying to do their jobs, encountered gross wrongdoing, tried to correct it, and then were crucified with Javert investigations, criminal probes, professional assassination, character smears, astronomical legal bills, and the attendant health problems and family troubles that few could avoid under such circumstances.

The Gaza issue had me cruising a bunch of Jewish and Muslim web sites I don’t usually visit, and as a result I found some amusing links I wouldn’t usually find. Like this report from JewishJournal.com about a Santa Monica synagogue trying (but failing) to break the Guinness record for simultaneous dreidel-spinning. That near-historic event caused the Bintel Blog to link to one of the few Tom Lehrer songs I’d never heard: Hanukkah in Santa Monica.

I was skeptical, but I was too lazy to chase the links and figure out if he was presenting the research honestly. Nate Silver was less lazy, and guess what? Mankiw didn’t present the research honestly. The paper he referenced (co-authored by Obama advisor Christina Romer) was not talking about a tax cut as a counter-cyclical stimulus, but about a tax cut under different circumstances entirely. And then Nate answered Mankiw’s response.

No Sift next Monday; holiday travel and socializing is going to eat all my time this week. But the Sift will be back on January 5.

Thanks to all of you who have asked, but I’m faring quite well under Winter’s assault on the Northeast. My apartment (in Nashua, NH) hasn’t lost electrical power, and I’m getting a Currier-and-Ives view from my desk overlooking the Nashua River. Yesterday I got out and tromped around in the snow, which in our local wetland park varied from 1 to 2 feet depending on unpredictable wind patterns. The most amusing thing I saw was on Main Street. Some deceased local Nashua guy has a bust in the center of downtown. I’ve never learned his story and his full name always escapes me, but the bust is labeled “Larry”. Well, Sunday it looked like Larry had joined the KKK — the wind had sculpted snow into a peaked white hood over his head.

In this Week’s Sift

• The Torture Discussion Spreads. For the last few years, the easiest way to get yourself denounced as a wild-eyed radical was to claim that high-ranking officials who ordered torture — which is a war crime — should be investigated and maybe even prosecuted. But as the Bush administration goes out brazenly defending its legacy, more and more mainstream voices are calling for some kind of legal accountability.
• What’s the Point of a Stimulus? Recessions are a funny time: Individuals need to save more, but the economy as a whole needs to spend more. Government has to make up the difference.
• The Next Time You’re at the Book Store … look for The Army of the Republic, a novel about what can happen when legal accountability (and other democratic processes) break down.
• About Rick Warren. I seem to be the only liberal who likes the idea of him delivering the invocation at Obamas inauguration.
• Short Notes. Lots of them this week, but they’re short. Don’t miss Time’s Top 10s.

Now that a Senate report has made official what we all knew anyway, you can add the New York Times to the list of folks who want Bush administration law-breakers brought to justice:

We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding. A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.

If things had played out like they usually do on 24 — if torture saved innocent lives, in other words — then we would need to have a real ethical debate. But a current Vanity Fair article sums up the tragedy of it all:

In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts

So torture is not an ethical dilemma at all, any more than it was an ethical dilemma whether we should rescue the people at the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, having morally impoverished people at the top of our government led to big screw-ups with no redeeming features whatsoever.

Glenn Greenwald charts how the bizarre leftist idea that government officials should be accountable for their crimes is spreading in the mainstream media. And he notes one of the big roadblocks to be overcome: Any real investigation will show that top Democrats in Congress knew what was going on, but didn’t want to challenge Bush for fear of appearing unpatriotic. This, by the way, is why you should stand by your principles even when the wind is blowing the other way. If you don’t, and your principles turn out to be right, you look really pathetic. You end up having to let the bad guys escape just to save yourself.

Sign the petition to demand a special prosecutor.

Look for The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen. It’s a very intelligent, very well written political thriller that captures a lot of the more extreme issues raised by the actions of the Bush administration.

A few years ago, during the Enron scandal, I had an intuition I decided not to talk much about: If a combination of smart lawyering and political influence allowed some big corporate malefactors (like Ken Lay) to walk away unpunished, that would create an opening for a left-wing terrorist group. In many segments of the population, assassinating a few such guys — guys the law apparently couldn’t touch — would have been very popular.

This novel begins with precisely such an assassination, by a group calling itself the Army of the Republic. (They have the coolest logo: Take the acronym AotR and merge the o and t to form the crosshairs of a rifle scope. Make the t-shirt red and the logo black, and you’d sell a lot of them.) The novel is set in an America where the excesses of the Bush administration became even more excessive: The government is run for the benefit of a class of plutocrats, who are making fortunes by privatizing public resources like water systems. There have been more wars. The media is manipulated by the government/plutocrat agenda. Elections are electronic, votes are counted by private corporations under government contract, and nobody trusts the administration’s “victories”. The administration has appointed enough judges by now that the courts will not stand against them. There’s a private security corporation called “Whitehall” (i.e. Blackwater) that operates under private contracts when it needs to do things government can’t do, and under government contracts when it needs to do things private companies can’t do; maybe it can do anything it wants.

The story is told in the first person, but the “I” shifts among three characters: a co-founder of AotR, a nonviolent liberal activist, and a plutocrat who didn’t set out to be a bad guy and is struggling hard to deny that he is a bad guy now. All three narrators are well-drawn characters and have an intelligent understanding of their strategies — you’ll learn a lot about terrorism, non-violent organizing, and manipulating a democracy for your own benefit. The author allows each narrator his/her point of view; Cohen himself is clearly on the Left, but the plutocrat is not always wrong, and exactly what Cohen thinks about the AotR is debatable.

The novel raises and explores big questions without claiming to settle them: What do you do when democracy starts to fail? What’s the role of violence? (The non-violent activist thinks that violent groups like AotR make it easier for the Regime to marginalize her. The terrorist thinks that nonviolent activism only works if there is also a threat of violence; he sees his group as the necessary Bad Cop that will cause the Regime to compromise with the nonviolent Good Cops.) When the justice system fails, is there a legitimate role for vigilantes?

In addition to the political insight, it’s just a good novel. I love the spycraft of the old John le Carre cold-war novels, and there’s plenty of that here. Also, Cohen writes good sentences. (That’s something I admire in a writer. I kept walking into the next room and interrupting my wife: “Listen to this one.”) He never settles for the cliche adjective or metaphor. And Cohen understands that you characterize a first-person narrator not by what he says about himself, but by what he says about other things: You picture the terrorist best when you ask “What kind of guy would use these words and think of these metaphors?”

With the elections of 2006 and 2008, you have to hope that the danger has passed. But if it hasn’t, if a Bush-only-moreso administration is in our future, then I could imagine The Army of the Republic playing a role similar to the one that Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang played (for better or worse) with ecotage groups like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front.

It’s only fiction until somebody does it.

Interesting article in Public Eye about conservative “post-Palin feminists” and what the Sarah Palin candidacy means to them. On the one hand Palin represented “traditional family values”. But on the other hand, Dad was watching the kids and being an attractive prop behind Mom’s run for national office. It’s hard to picture that happening in, say, your basic suburban ranch-house family of the 1950s.

In general, liberals and conservatives alike tend to underestimate the extent to which the meaning of “traditional” shifts from one generation to the next. The article quotes scholar Bradford Wilcox saying that white Evangelicals “typically talk right and, often unwittingly, stumble left.”

While you’re at the Public Eye website, you might want to look at this critique of conservative “marriage promotion” policies as a way to address poverty.

Then we get to the real point: teaching. Higher grades in college, more education, higher scores on standardized tests — none of that predicts who’s going to be a good teacher. And good teachers really do matter. He claims that a really bad teacher gets half a year of progress out of an average student in a year, while a really good teacher gets a year and a half of progress — a 1 year-per-year difference.

Gladwell winds up with a completely different model of how we should hire and retain teachers: Lower standards, hire way more new teachers than we need, see who actually succeeds or fails in the job, fire all but the top performers among the new teachers, and pay the survivors well enough that it was worth the risk of failing. After all, that’s what we do with quarterbacks.