TMI

The informational shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

– Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise (2012)

This week people stopped just talking about guns and started doing things

New York State passed what one legislator described as “the toughest gun law in the nation” and the NRA called “draconian”. It’s the first new gun law since the Newtown massacre.  Meanwhile, President Obama laid out his plan to reduce gun violence.

I saw a lot of commenters use the adjective “bold” to describe Obama’s proposals, but I think that just underlines how frozen the gun-control conversation has been. Limiting magazine size and restoring the ban on assault weapons are popular measures that seem like the least we can do. The rest of his 23 “executive actions” include steps that are surprising only in that they hadn’t been done a long time ago: appointing a permanent ATF director, allowing the CDC to study the public health effects of guns, and so on.

Obama’s actions were commonly misreported as “23 executive orders“. (Actually only three of the actions were orders.) It will be interesting to see whether the panic about the “orders” will continue now that the full blandness of the orders is apparent. Here, for example, a Christian talkradio host and a pro-gun advocate go on at length about possible reactions (rebellion? local refusal to enforce? impeachment?) to an anticipated executive order confiscating guns. The striking thing about this conversation is that it was based on exactly nothing. Obama’s executive orders hadn’t even been written yet, and neither man claimed to have a source inside the White House.

BTW, if you’ve been wondering who needs semi-automatic weapons with 100-round magazines, the answer is obvious: people who are preparing for an apocalypse. There are more of them than you think. When you have to defend your cans of Himalayan salt from the ravening hordes, you’ll need that kind of firepower.

And if you want to plunge deeply into the conspiracy-theory world, google “false flag operation”. A false flag operation is when disguised agents stage an event, so that the organization they really represent can react against it. As in the Reichstag Fire. There are false-flag conspiracy theories about both the Newtown and Aurora massacres, contending that the government staged the events to create an excuse for confiscating guns.

But they also talked about Obama’s second term

Can you believe it’s just now Inauguration Day? Wasn’t the election like a decade ago?

Both liberals and conservatives see a change in President Obama since the first inauguration. He came into the presidency trying to work with Republicans as if they were reasonable people who wanted to solve America’s problems. That was naive.

The iconic example is the stimulus. Obama took office amid a global crash that had even conservative economists calling for a stimulus. Liberals and conservatives mainly disagreed on the size of the stimulus and whether it should be mostly tax cuts or mostly new spending. (“A stimulus is needed without further delay,” Mitt Romney wrote in December 2008, advising Republicans to insist “that tax cuts are part of the solution”.) So Obama proposed a smaller stimulus than liberals wanted and made it 1/3 tax cuts, thinking this was a nice split-the-difference bill that a large majority could get behind. This netted him zero Republican votes in the House and demonization of his “socialist” plan.

Or health care: Rather than the single-payer model liberals favor, Obama based his plan on Romney’s Massachusetts plan (which in turn had been based on work by the conservative Heritage Foundation). Along the way, he dropped the public option and tweaked the plan in a variety of other ways to answer Republican criticism. Result: unanimous Republican opposition.

Again and again, Republicans turned against their own ideas as soon as Obama got on board. John McCain opposed the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade plan. When Obama offered John Boehner a deficit-reduction plan structured according to Republican proposals, Boehner walked out. It went on and on.

By the fall campaign Obama clearly realized this had gone far enough. He called Republicans out on their extreme anti-woman and anti-Hispanic positions, as well as their math-challenged tax proposals. Since the election, he has driven a hard bargain on the fiscal cliff and offered nothing in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. (He won.) His common-sense gun-control proposal puts Republicans on the spot: Do they side with the American people or with the NRA?

Ross Douhat imagines an no-fluff second inaugural address that recognizes Republican extremists’ role in their defeat:

Next, a big, big shout-out to my opponents on the right — I really couldn’t have done it without you. … Every time I needed to paint the American right as paranoid and out-of-touch, misogynistic and mindless, you were there for me. Thanks for making Sandra Fluke a martyr, Rush. Thanks for Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, Mr. Ailes. Thanks for everything, Donald Trump. Todd Akin — I love you, man.

Both liberal and conservative pundits see the possibility that Obama’s second term could splinter the Republican Party. John Dickerson:

Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

Conservative Michael Gerson:

Obama must be tempted by a shiny political object: the destruction of the congressional GOP. He knows that Republicans are forced by the momentum of their ideology to take positions on spending that he can easily demagogue. He is in a good position to humiliate them again — to expose their internal divisions and unpopular policy views.

Gerson pre-scolds Obama for choosing that option, but his argument sounds like a wife-beater’s brother saying “Now look what you made him do.” Republicans are forced to take extreme positions, so it’s just not fair for Obama make reasonable and popular proposals they will have to reject. David Brooks sounds like an older battered wife giving advice to a younger one: He lays out in detail how Obama should tip-toe through his second term to avoid setting off Congress’ right-wing lunatics. (Jonathan Chait has been brilliant at calling out this stuff.)

That’s not how it’s going to go. If congressional Republicans can’t control themselves, second-term Obama is going to place a 911 call to the voters and have them taken away.

It’s about time.

… but I wrote about information overload

How Do You Know What You Know? looks at two recent books: Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise and Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s Blur. Each looks at how to deal with information overload, and Silver raises an interesting parallel between the internet revolution and the printing-press revolution: Both led to polarization. The reason is expressed in this week’s quote.

… and you also might be interested in …

If you’re not watching The Abolitionists, you’re missing out. Part III airs tomorrow, but you can catch up by watching I and II on the PBS web site. Even if you think you know this history, it’s stunning to see the interweaving threads of the full tapestry.

If a Whole Foods employee were doing this much damage to the brand, John Mackey would fire him.

I’m developing an affection for the League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog. Their Guns in America symposium is both diverse and rational. If all the positions you are hearing are extreme, read a few articles here.

Glenn Beck is designing his utopia. Laugh if you want, but there’s a more interesting way to look at it: A certain kind of communitarianism has cross-partisan appeal. Like many liberal visions, Beck’s “Independence, USA” has small locally-owned shops rather than WalMart, and walkable streets rather than superhighways and parking decks. It grows its own food instead of trucking it in from big agribusinesses. I’m not sure how Beck imagines maintaining this urban plan without the heavy hand of a central bureaucracy, but let it go; utopias are like that.

Because reading the Weekly Sift should improve your life: 50 Life Hacks to Simplify Your World, most of which left me asking “Why didn’t I think of that?” Here’s #24:

January 21, 2013 – 11:52 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

How do you know what you know?

why the internet isn’t making us wiser

If you’d never experienced the flood of information that comes from a revolutionary new technology, you might expect it to power growth in everything downstream from information: knowledge, understanding, and even wisdom. If it’s easier to find things out, then people should know more, understand more, and make better choices. You might even expect more consensus. Ignorant people can come to blows debating whether Kansas is north or south of Nebraska, but the more we know and understand about the world we all live in, the more agreement we should find.

Since you’re living through the internet revolution right now, though, you know better. More knowledge? Maybe. Understanding? Hard to say. But wisdom? Surely you jest. And consensus … some days we seem lucky just to avoid civil war.

Nate Silver thinks we could have seen this coming, because the same thing happened in the last information revolution. Eventually Gutenberg’s printing press led to the Enlightenment, democracy, modern science, and the Industrial Revolution. But that light came at the end of a nasty 300-year tunnel of constant strife and near-genocidal religious wars. In the Thirty Years War alone “the male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.”

But why? Nate explains:

The informational shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

Reducing that to a bumpersticker: TMI equals polarization.

Picture it: Before Gutenberg, baptism was baptism. The priest did it, and if we wondered what it meant or why he did it that way, maybe we could ask him and maybe he’d explain by waving in the direction of a Bible that some monk had spent years producing by hand. (You could get your own — in Latin, a language that neither you nor Moses ever spoke — for about the cost of a Mercedes today.)

After Gutenberg, you say babies can be baptized by sprinkling water on them, while I accept only full-submersion adult baptism. We each own pamphlets from our own theologians, quoting passages of scripture that we have each checked in our translated Bibles at home. We each belong to religious communities that agree with us, and our respective church libraries are stocked with many other pamphlets listing the outrages that the opposing community has committed against us and providing reams of evidence proving that the conflict is all their fault.

What can we do but kill each other?

Information is great when you have some reasonable way of processing it. But when you don’t, it’s overwhelming and even threatening. If you try to pay attention to all of it, you’ll freeze. And then the people who didn’t freeze will eat your lunch — or eat you for lunch.

There are two easy ways to deal with information overload:

  • Submit unquestioningly to an authority who decides what’s what.
  • Find a simple worldview that pleasingly organizes the wild flood of facts and interpretations, and then ally with people who subscribe to that worldview.

Both choices are cultish, but the second can seem downright enlightened, at least from the inside. Unlike the unquestioning follower, you’re always learning new facts and interpretations. You’re getting better and better at explaining why your tribe’s view is right and the opposing view is wrong. And you do ask questions, but you’ve learned to ask the right questions — unlike those mindless sheep in the opposing tribe.

In other words, you live inside a tribal bubble that lets pleasing information in and keeps disturbing information out. The information flood actually helps you do this, because the more details, the easier to cherry-pick support for whatever you want to believe.

These delusions are easy to see in other people: conspiracy theorists, global-warming deniers, Birthers, and so on. You can never win an argument against such folks, because there is always more information you haven’t explained, some new micro-analysis that “proves” Obama’s birth certificate is fake or explains why the world is really cooling. You never reach the end of it, precisely because the 21st-century information barrel is bottomless.

That’s why liberals like me — and probably Nate Silver more than anybody — had to love watching Republicans cope with the election returns. Nate had dispassionately put together a prediction model and he faithfully ran new polling data through it every day. It turned out to be down-the-line accurate, but until the votes were actually counted he was vilified by people who wanted to believe Romney would win. And not just ignorantly vilified, vilified with spreadsheets and graphs and detailed explanations of what he must be doing wrong.

It’s rare to run into such a perfect bubble-pricking.

But Silver’s book (published before the election) isn’t about self-congratulation. It’s about why accurate prediction is hard and how to do it better. Each chapter describes a prediction-making community — meteorologists, baseball stat geeks, poker players, etc. — and draws some general lesson from their collective success or failure.

Some of those lessons are technical, but a few general-public themes come through:

  • Foxes beat hedgehogs. People who have one big idea do badly in an information flood, because they can always explain away their failures without changing their big idea. But people who juggle multiple competing ideas can use new data to develop the good ones and discredit the bad ones.
  • Data doesn’t interpret itself. The best predictions don’t come from pure pattern matching, but from a plausible theory that is then proven by experiment. If you just pattern-match, you’ll end up modeling the noise rather than the signal.
  • Make specific predictions so you can recognize your mistakes. Since it always rains eventually, if you aren’t specific about when you expect rain and how much, you’ll always be able to claim you were right — and you won’t learn anything.
  • Be methodical. If you don’t define how you’re going to judge your results, the temptation to cherry-pick will overwhelm you.

Always in the background lies this lesson: Bubbles don’t just happen to other people. It’s a universal human tendency in the face of too much information. If you’re not constantly on guard — and maybe even if you are — you will fall prey to it.

Western civilization came out of the Gutenberg Tunnel when it developed more rigorous collective methods of handling the increased information flow: Science, most obviously, but also market capitalism, journalism, and constitutional democracies that could balance majority rule with tolerance for minority rights. Maybe a similar leap will get us through the Internet Tunnel eventually — better sooner than later.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have a less sweeping focus: How are you personally going to cope?

If we continue the Gutenberg analogy, there’s a clear analog to the priest and the universal church he represented: the editor and the culture of journalistic objectivity.

Once upon a time, national news outlets were few and were controlled by gatekeepers who told you “the way it is“. Every evening, the remarkably similar news departments of the three major networks told you what you needed to know. If you wanted more detail, you read a daily newspaper or weekly news magazines, but even they wouldn’t give you a fundamentally different worldview.

As I’ve described in more detail elsewhere, this system was both good and bad. (The same could be said of the pre-Gutenberg Catholic Church). The gatekeepers tried to be accurate, and they had the power to hold a story back until they could verify it. So rumors got squashed, hucksters were weeded out, and special-interest groups couldn’t trump up a story out of nothing. And because the gatekeepers defined news by what people should know rather than what they wanted to know, the Vietnam War never vanished from public awareness the way the Afghan War often has.

On the downside, the range of views presented was narrow. Only by staging artificial public events (like Martin Luther King’s March on Washington) could marginalized groups push their message through the editorial bottleneck.

Now that’s all gone. There is no priest, or rather there are too many would-be priests sprinkling dubious holy water in all directions.

In essence, we are all editors now. We used to get a filtered flow of information, pre-tested and pre-sanitized by experts. Now we’re exposed to the raw flood, which we have to test and sanitize for ourselves. So we all need to learn the ways of thought that used to only be taught in journalism school.

That’s what Blur is about.

A lot of Kovach and Rosenstiel’s advice is common sense. Before you react to a news article or factoid, you need to take a step back and judge it like an editor: Where does this information come from? Are the sources in a position to know? Do they have reason to lie? Am I just being told a story, or are there checkable facts here? Has anybody checked them? What is left out of this article? Does it raise obvious questions that are not answered? If the article focuses on only a few characters in the story, would other characters tell it differently? And so on. If you have a critical, analytical mind, the questions aren’t hard to generate once you realize that you need to take a step back and judge.

I found one piece of their analysis very insightful, and I may start using their terminology. They identify three models of journalism: verification, assertion, and affirmation. I don’t like how they present affirmation (probably because they belong to the verification tribe and the Weekly Sift is affirmation journalism), but the distinctions themselves are worthwhile.

Journalism of verification. This is the gatekeeper model of the Cronkite Era and the ideal that you will hear expressed by the editors of publications like the New York Times. (For now let’s leave alone the question of how well they live up to that ideal.) Check everything. Get it right before you publish. Be objective. Be complete. Put a wall between news and opinion.

Journalism of assertion. The model most often seen on CNN. Put newsmakers on camera and see what they say. (If you can only get them on camera by agreeing not to raise certain subjects, fine.) Let viewers judge for themselves whether they’re being lied to. Get information out as quickly as possible, even if you haven’t checked that it’s true. Strive for balance rather than accuracy; let liberals and conservatives alike spin the story for your audience, and then “leave it there” rather than check who’s right.

Journalism of affirmation. The model shared by Fox News, the nighttime line-up of MSNBC, and (mostly) the Weekly Sift. Have a point of view and attract an audience that (mostly) shares that view.

Reading Blur, you will get the idea that verification is the gold standard, while assertion and affirmation are in some way illegitimate. (I was struck by how often Rachel Maddow — who I admire — came up as a bad example.) I’d express this differently: assertion and affirmation journalism are illegitimate if they pretend to be verification journalism.

That is my biggest objection to Fox News — the pretense that they’re “fair and balanced”. If they billed themselves as “interpreting the world through a conservative prism”, I’d respect them more.

Affirmation journalism is legitimate to the extent that it’s honest and tries to serve its audience rather than pander to them so their attention can be sold to advertisers. Like verification journalists, an affirmation journalist should be trying to get it right, and also should provide a verification trail (that’s what the links are for on the Weekly Sift), honestly represent the people s/he quotes, endorse only arguments s/he believes are valid, not intentionally hide facts or points of view from its audience, and so on. (That’s my other problem with Fox. I don’t think they’re just conservative. I think they repeat talking points they know are false and use frames designed to deceive.)

In short, I think affirmation (and assertion too) can be done well. Rachel Maddow isn’t just Sean Hannity’s mirror image.

Tying this back to Nate Silver and the bubble tendency: Part of being honest and doing affirmation journalism well is recognizing the constant danger of winding up in a delusional bubble. Because there is a real world out there, and it will bite you if you turn your back on it, as Fox News viewers discovered on election night.

So serving you as a reader means not pleasing you too well. I could tell you a lot of things that would make you feel good about yourself and say “Hell yes!”. But some of them would set you up for a comeuppance.

And as for the horrors that might still await in the Internet Tunnel: Wishing to be out the other side doesn’t make it so, and affirmation journalism is popular because the priesthood of verification journalism is broken; it doesn’t know how to handle the flood. Maybe someday they will figure it out, or some new information-processing methodology will burst onto the scene the way science did in the 1600s. But for now, all I know how to do is to choose my simplifying assumptions as best I can, revisit them from time to time, and proceed honestly from there.

January 21, 2013 – 10:31 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (9)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Happy Inauguration Day!

I expect to have all this week’s articles posted before President Obama’s speech, so I won’t say anything about that until next week. This week, I’ll just comment on the more aggressive tone I expect to see in the second term. No more “I Hope you’ll be reasonable so we can Change things.”

Also, this week the post-Newtown talk about guns started turning into action. New York State passed a new law, and the Obama/Biden plan came out. To the great surprise of paranoids from coast to coast, Obama didn’t issue an executive order confiscating all the guns. I guess that will delay the armed rebellion for a few weeks.

But this week’s main article is a double book review wrapped up in commentary. Tentatively titled “How do you know what you know?”, it discusses why the information explosion isn’t leading to more wisdom and consensus. I realize it’s no great revelation to point out that we’re not trending toward wisdom and consensus, but if you’d never seen an information explosion, you might think we should be. If stuff is easier to find out, wouldn’t that lead people to know more, understand more, make wiser choices, and agree on some basic facts? Why isn’t that happening?

Nate Silver starts The Signal and the Noise by looking back at the last info-revolution, Gutenberg’s, and observing that it also led to polarization and strife. You can look at that book and Blur by Kovach and Rosenstiel as training manuals for mitigating the problems that come from information overload.

January 21, 2013 – 6:55 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Too Simple

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. — John Kenneth Galbraith (1975)

This week everybody was talking about guns again

In an effort to save their party from its lunatic fringe, even Republicans were talking about gun control. Frank Luntz:

The Second Amendment deserves defending, but do Republicans truly believe that anyone should be able to buy any gun, anywhere, at any time? If yes, they’re on the side of less than 10 percent of America.

Mark McKinnon lists some of Mayor Bloomberg’s gun-control proposals, notes that they don’t affect “hunting, recreation, or self-defense” and then asks:

[I]f the ideas are reasonable and don’t limit legitimate activities, then why not consider them?

But gun-advocate rhetoric takes place in a binary frame where (1) no restrictions and (2) total confiscation are the only real options. So when Vice President Biden said that some action might happen through executive order, gun-nuts went nuttier: Obama was threatening confiscation by executive order! Alex Jones:

1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! It doesn’t matter how many lemmings you get out there in the street begging for them to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them. Do you understand?

No, it won’t by 1776 again. It will be 1791.

I wonder if Luntz and McKinnon have noticed something that the NRA hasn’t: The binary frame used to work in the NRA’s favor, because the NRA would win an all-or-none choice. But maybe we’ve hit a tipping point, where if you force the public to choose between the status quo and confiscation, confiscation might win. Maybe the NRA should be the side looking for reasonable compromise.

The most extreme part of the gun debate isn’t about hunting or home-defense at all. It’s about the right of the People to overthrow the government by force — even if it’s the government the People just elected. As Kevin Williamson put it in National Review:

There is no legitimate exception to the Second Amendment for military-style weapons, because military-style weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear.

This was Myth #6 (“The Second Amendment Allows Citizens to Threaten the Government”) in Garrett Epps’ recent constitutional law book Wrong and Dangerous. The Economist’s “Democracy in America” column characterized it as “the right to commit treason” and noted that

Popular militias are overwhelming likely to foster not democracy or the rule of law, but warlordism, tribalism and civil war. In Lebanon, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Colombia, the Palestinian Territories and elsewhere, we see that militias of armed private citizens rip apart weak democratic states in order to prey upon local populations in authoritarian sub-states or fiefdoms. Free states are defended by standing armies, not militias, because free states enjoy the consent of the governed, which allows them to maintain effective standing armies.

Undeniably, this is not how the Founders expected history to play out. But that’s how it has played out. A popular militia resisting authoritarian takeover and restoring democracy

is a thing that happens in silly movies. It is not a thing that happens in the world.

Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf notes that the conservative movement that promotes this Second-Amendment myth shows no inclination to support rights that actually do deter tyranny.

If you were a malign leader intent on imposing tyranny, what would you find more useful, banning high-capacity magazines… or a vast archive of the bank records, phone calls, texts and emails of millions of citizens that you could access in secret? Would you, as a malign leader, feel more empowered by a background check requirement on gun purchases… or the ability to legally kill anyone in secret on your say so alone? The powers the Republican Party has given to the presidency since 9/11 would obviously enable far more grave abuses in the hands of a would be tyrant than any gun control legislation with even a miniscule chance of passing Congress. So why are so many liberty-invoking 2nd Amendment absolutists reliable Republican voters, as if the GOP’s stance on that issue somehow makes up for its shortcomings? And why do they so seldom speak up about threats to the Bill of Rights that don’t involve guns?

In reality, the greatest threat to our democracy are the Alex-Jones and Sharron-Angle types who want to take up arms because their candidate lost the election.

Jon Stewart characterized the attitude blocking reasonable gun control as the fear of “imaginary Hitlers”. Gun-nuts’

paranoid fear of a possible dystopic future prevents us from addressing our actual dystopic present.


Like climate change and voter fraud, the gun-policy debate takes place largely in Bizarro World, as gun-rights advocates freely make up whatever facts they need and cite each other as references for them. Here are two debunking articles to keep bookmarked:

  • The Hitler Gun Control Lie (Salon). No, Hitler did not take away the German people’s guns. Actually, the Nazi regime weakened the gun restrictions it inherited from the Weimar Republic. (Stalin wasn’t big into disarming the public either.)
  • Mythbusting: Israel and Switzerland are not gun-toting utopias (WaPo). Gun advocates point to Israel and Switzerland as “societies where guns are reputed to be widely available, but where gun violence is rare”.  In non-Bizarro-World, American gun-control advocates would love to have the laws of Israel or Switzerland.

The NRA’s Wayne La Pierre says, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” I guess he never saw Witness.

And let’s give the last word to The Onion:

Following the events of last week, in which a crazed western lowland gorilla ruthlessly murdered 21 people in a local shopping plaza after escaping from the San Diego Zoo, sources across the country confirmed Thursday that national gorilla sales have since skyrocketed.

… and trillion-dollar coins

This idea has been bouncing around since before the last debt crisis (and I’ve linked to explanations of it several times), but this week it crossed over from a fringy what-if to a policy option that Serious People need to have an opinion about.

I collect a number of those opinions in The Trillion-Dollar Coin Hits the Big Time. (Most boil down to: It’s nutty, but it’s better than defaulting.)

A side-effect of this discussion is that more and more of the public is coming to understand how money really works. Long-time Sift readers have had cause to remember my review of Warren Mosler’s book in the summer of 2011.

James Fallows suggests The Two Sentences That Should Be Part of All Discussion of the Debt Ceiling:

  1. Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize one single penny in additional public spending.
  2. For Congress to “decide whether” to raise the debt ceiling, for programs and tax rates it has already voted into law, makes exactly as much sense as it would for a family to “decide whether” to pay a credit-card bill for goods it has already bought.

An analogy I’ve used before: It’s like eating out when you don’t have cash, but then refusing to pay with your credit card because you’re taking a principled stand against running up more debt. The time to take the principled stand is when you decide what you’re going to do, not when the bill comes.

… which once again brings up the issue of unraveling social norms

The coin and the debt-ceiling hostage crisis it’s supposed to avert are both examples of something I’ve tried (and mostly failed) to describe before: unraveling the norms that make society governable. Maybe Chris Hayes expresses it better:

Behavior of individuals within an institution is constrained by the formal rules (explicit prohibitions) and norms (implicit prohibitions) that aren’t spelled out, but just aren’t done. And what the modern Republican Party has excelled at, particularly in the era of Obama, is exploiting the gap between these two. They’ve made a habit of doing the thing that just isn’t done.

He goes on to give examples: filibustering everything the Senate does, refusing to confirm qualified candidates to positions because you think the position shouldn’t exist, and now “using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip with which to extract ransom”.

He might also mention the proposal that Republicans should rig the Electoral College in states where they control the legislature. The point, pretty clearly, is to be able to win presidential elections even if the People vote for the other guy. (That’s what would have happened in 2012 under at least one plan: Obama gets 5 million more votes, but Romney becomes president.) It’s all perfectly legal, but this is the United States. We don’t do things like that. Or at least we didn’t used to.

The meta-question of the trillion-dollar coin is whether Democrats should strike back with their own inside-the-rules-but-outside-the-norms actions, recognizing (as Chris puts it) that “There is no way to unilaterally maintain norms.”

We need to get a handle on this trend somehow, because it doesn’t go anywhere good. That’s one of the themes in Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series: Ultimately, even respect for the written law is just a norm. At some point you start to think, “Why shouldn’t I stick my enemies’ heads on spikes and display them in the Forum?”

… and racism

Republicans hate it when you point to the implicit racism in the intensity of their hatred for Obama and all his works. But Colin Powell went there Sunday on Meet the Press, talking about the “dark vein of intolerance” in the Republican Party. He pointed to voter suppression, to racial code phrases like “shucking and jiving” applied to Obama, and to Birtherism.

But racism is also part of the willingness to violate previously accepted norms (that I was just talking about). Republicans feel justified in doing things that just aren’t done because (until now) electing and re-electing a black president just wasn’t done. Racism is the ultimate root of the Tea Party certainty that we are in uncharted waters that require unprecedented means of resistance. Just voting and campaigning and giving money to your favored candidates isn’t enough any more. We need to arm ourselves and prepare for “Second Amendment solutions” because … because why, exactly?

If you doubt the racial subtext here, think about how different it would sound for a black CEO to threaten that if a white president’s policy “goes one inch farther, I’m gonna start killin’ people.” Fox News would play that clip 24/7 for weeks.

… and you also might be interested in

Mitch McConnell might face a primary because of the fiscal cliff deal. Good news for Democrats? An Aiken/Mourdock Tea Party wacko is much more likely to lose this otherwise safe Kentucky senate seat to a Democrat (Ashley Judd?). Or bad news? If the minority leader goes down in a primary, no Republican will ever again compromise or negotiate.

The Greek economic crisis has taken on symbolic importance in this country; in any discussion of the deficit conservatives are bound to say that overspending is turning us into Greece. But Foreign Policy provides a seldom-mentioned tidbit:

the [Greek] state is facing a revenue crisis, in part because of rampant tax evasion. In 2012, the European Commission estimated the size of Greece’s shadow economy to be 24 percent of GDP, resulting in an annual $13 billion loss in revenue.

And the Center for American Progress amplifies:

when Greece is properly placed in the context of its EU partners and neighbors, it becomes clear that its spending is very much in line with European norms. … In fact, total government spending for the European Union as a whole equaled 50.7 percent of GDP, actually a bit higher than Greece.

So Greece spends less of its national income on government programs than its sensible cousin Germany. And the Greek people work more. Maybe the lesson for the U.S. to learn from Greece isn’t that the safety net is unsustainable. It’s that you’ve got to collect taxes.

No matter how many disastrous gaffes they suffer, Republicans just can’t stop talking about rape. This Democrat is no feminist prize either.

Remember Roy Moore, the “ten commandments judge” who lost his job as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court by defying federal court orders? He’s back. The people of Alabama elected him chief justice again in November, and he was sworn in Friday. Remind me why we didn’t let Alabama secede.

The White House’s We the People project promises that if an online petition gets enough support

White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.

Well, 34,000 people signed a petition asking for construction of a Death Star to begin by 2016. So the head of OMB’s Science and Space Branch responded with these criticisms: The Death Star project would increase the deficit. It has a fatal design flaw exploitable by a one-man ship. Plus “The administration does not support blowing up planets.”

January 14, 2013 – 11:22 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

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The Trillion-Dollar Coin Hits the Big Time

The notion that President Obama could avoid the debt ceiling by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin and depositing it in the government’s account at the Federal Reserve has been around for a while now. (I first noticed it in July, 2011.) It sounds ridiculous because it is. (Even people who favor the idea understand that.) It’s a wacky solution that underlines just how wacky the whole debt-ceiling problem is in the first place.

Think about the situation President Obama will find himself in (by about mid-February) if the debt ceiling isn’t raised: Laws passed by Congress tell the President what taxes he can collect, what money he must spend, and that (even though these numbers don’t balance) he can’t borrow. Meanwhile, the Constitution tells him that his first duty is to “faithfully execute the laws”.

What’s he supposed to do? Several people, including Matt Yglesias, claim that the Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974* leaves the administration with no legal choices other than something off-the-wall like a trillion-dollar coin.

During the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis, the Very Serious Persons of the punditocracy did not stoop to comment on the trillion-dollar coin. Instead, they just refused to believe that our politics had gotten that dysfunctional. Congress might appear to be steaming headlong towards welching on all our nation’s commitments, but at the last minute wisdom would prevail. And lo: Congress temporized, giving a Super Committee of the Wise time to design an austerity plan.

Well, that worked out just dandy, didn’t it? The Super Committee deadlocked in the same place Obama and Boehner had: Republicans would not raise rich people’s taxes by a single dime, and Democrats refused to thrust all the sacrifice onto the old, the sick, and the poor. That deadlock set up the fiscal-cliff conflict that Congress again avoided at the last minute, but didn’t resolve. Now we’re looking at a second debt-ceiling showdown.

I think that sequence of events has been an eye-opener for the VSPs: Seriously? You want to do that again? [Yes, they do.]

Suddenly, the trillion-dollar coin doesn’t look so crazy. Well, it is still crazy. But picking a path into the fiscal future is starting to feel like picking a Bull Goose Loony at the asylum. Tom the Dancing Bug provides the proper level of seriousness:

So this week the trillion-dollar coin suddenly went from a fringy absurdity to a policy option that every VSP needs to have an opinion on. The WaPo asked financial types how the markets would react. Wednesday, NBC’s Chuck Todd asked about it at a White House press briefing, and Jay Carney dodged. “I would refer you to the Treasury.” Saturday, the Treasury issued an official denial.

Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit.

But a lot of other VSPs regard it as a viable option. Paul Krugman was one of the few to comment during the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis: “Outrageous behavior demands extraordinary responses.” He came back to it this week, characterizing Obama’s options as:

one [the coin] that’s silly but benign, the other [default] that’s equally silly but both vile and disastrous. The decision should be obvious.

Thursday he added: “we need a strategy to deal with the crazies if they really do prove irredeemably crazy, which seems all too possible.”

Former CBO director Donald Marron more-or-less agrees: The coin option “lacks dignity”, but “might be better than the alternatives if we reach the brink of default”. Former Director of the Mint Philip Diehl says minting the coin would work and have no obvious bad effects on the economy. As a co-author of the law it takes advantage of, he writes:

Yes, this is an unintended consequence of the platinum coin bill, but how many other pieces of legislation have had unintended consequences? Most, I’d guess.

And Atlantic’s Matthew O’Brien adds:

If it’s a choice between defaulting on our obligations, and minting a trillion-dollar coin, I say mint the coin. In an ideal world, Obama would end the platinum coin loophole in return for the House GOP forever ending the debt ceiling, as Josh Barro proposed, but I’ll settle for anything that involves us paying our bills as we promised.

So far, most conservatives still refuse to take this idea seriously. But they want the rest of us to take their don’t-raise-the-debt-ceiling threat seriously, and threaten impeachment if Obama somehow circumvents it.

Continuing to stake their claim as the Party of Stupid, Republicans at the NRCC tweeted an image** of a coin made out of a trillion dollars worth of platinum — as if that’s how coinage works. And the Network of Stupid made the same mistake even after the NRCC had been widely lampooned.

But liberals have an objection also, which Ezra Klein expressed like this:

The platinum coin is an attempt to delay a reckoning that we unfortunately need to have. It takes a debate that will properly focus on the GOP’s reckless threat to force the United States into default and refocuses it on a seemingly absurd power grab by the executive branch.

The right way for this crisis to end, Klein believes, is for the remaining grown-ups in the Republican Party (i.e., the business community) to take back control in order to save the day. That will start a civil war inside the party, so they will only do it if they have no choice; if they think Obama can still pull a day-saving gimmick out of his hat — especially one that could make him vulnerable politically — they won’t.

That’s why wannabe Republican grown-up Philip Klein (no relation) says minting the coin “would be tossing a life preserver to Republicans”.

Obama apparently agrees. That’s why he’s steadfastly refusing to take the burden off Congress by embracing any executive-branch gimmicks. He thinks Congress should pass a clean debt-ceiling bill. If House Republicans want to tie the ceiling increase to unpopular spending cuts, they can spell out what those cuts are. He isn’t going to give them any political cover.

[I’ve explained the politics of this many times: The American people have only very hazy notions of how the government spends money. So “spending” in general is unpopular, but the particular things the government actually spends on — Medicare, Social Security, defense — are very popular. Republicans want to take advantage of this by opposing “spending” but getting Obama to specify which programs to cut.]

Here’s how I put all that together: The coin would be a last resort, and while Obama should hold it in mind to buck up his resolve, the administration is right to deny that they are open to it — until the public understands that we are in last-resort territory and clamors for any kind of solution.

“Last resort” means: The Republicans have blocked a clean bill raising the debt ceiling. The Treasury has run out of books it can juggle to keep paying the bills. The government has shut down all but the most essential services, furloughed its workers, and the public has felt the first pinches: Retirees find that there is no one to process their Social Security applications. Income tax refunds are delayed indefinitely. Defense contractors are filing lawsuits to get paid. And there’s a big interest payment due on the national debt that there may not be money to cover***. The stock market is crashing. Wall Street is begging its bought-and-paid-for congressmen to do something. But still the House majority refuses to raise the debt limit.

Then — and only then — does Obama go on TV, explain the coin loophole to the public, say he has reconsidered his decision not to use it, and promise to trade away that ridiculous power forever if Congress also eliminates the ridiculous debt ceiling.

If that scenario plays out, America will be a laughing stock to the rest of the world. But we will have taken a pratfall, not tumbled into an abyss.

*After President Nixon “impounded” money Congress appropriated to buy stuff he didn’t like, Congress passed a law demanding that future presidents spend whatever Congress appropriates.

**Their image contains a false frame I can’t let pass: It’s not “Obama’s spending”, it’s the spending of the United States of America, duly authorized and appropriated according the Constitution.

***As Josh Barro points out: It isn’t just that incoming revenue covers only 60% of expenditures over the course of a year. Both revenue and expenses are “lumpy”.

It would be impossible to give certainty to people and entities owed money by the federal government about when and whether they would be paid; they would have to wait and see how much money the government could come up with on any given day.

January 14, 2013 – 8:01 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It looks like we’re going to be talking about guns for a while. Last week I presented a bunch of my own thoughts, so this week I’m mainly collecting what other people are saying — including a hilarious Onion article about how gorilla sales always spike following a major gorilla attack.

The other thing everybody has been talking about this week is the trillion-dollar coin. I’m not sure how these things happen. Two weeks ago this was a fringy topic, the banker-and-economist version of science fiction. In the last few days, though, it has turned into something every pundit needs to have an opinion about. The White House has even had to deny its intention to mint the coin. Now if only House Republicans would deny their intention to prevent the nation from paying its bills by failing to raise the debt ceiling. The two ideas are both nutty, but at least the coin is harmlessly nutty.

I was going to use the coin/ceiling as an example of a larger point I somehow never express convincingly: the difference between rules and norms in a democracy, and how our norms are dangerously eroding. Fortunately, Chris Hayes did this for me on his show Saturday morning, so I can quote him instead.

In the short notes: the Greek economic problem isn’t overspending; Obama refuses to build a Death Star; Jon Stewart destroys the 67 Republican congressmen who voted against Hurricane Sandy relief; and a new report spells out just how bad American health is compared to other rich countries.

January 14, 2013 – 6:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Preparations

I have, already, spent far too much of my life preparing for violence. — Ta-Nehisi Coates, “On Living Armed“

This week everybody was talking about the fiscal cliff deal

and where it all goes from here as we approach the debt ceiling. My take is here: Avoid the cliff, hit the ceiling. Short version: Who you think got the better of the fiscal cliff deal depends on what you think happens next. Republicans think the debt ceiling gives them the leverage now, and Obama disagrees. We’ll know by March.

… but I wrote about guns

Remember guns? It was all anybody could talk about a couple weeks ago. Let’s hope the issue hasn’t faded by the time Biden’s recommendations come in. One Nation, Under Guard: fantasy, reality, and Sandy Hook

… and you also might be interested in …

More and more it looks like Rick Perlstein was right: Right-wing media is as much about conning the sheep as it is about politics. This week’s evidence: Dick Armey says FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck $1 million to say “nice things about FreedomWorks on the air”. Nice things that Beck’s listeners were supposed to believe he believed.

OK, cable news networks, here’s the political infotainment I really want to see: Pundit Wars. A politically diverse collection of pundits each starts with a stake of, say, $10,000. Each week the host presents a list of things that might or might not happen in near future, and each pundit quotes a likelihood. (“I think there’s a 30% chance we won’t get a debt-ceiling deal in time to prevent the government shutting down.”) Having all announced their numbers, they are then free to make bets with each other, quoting odds if necessary. (“I’ll give you 2-1 odds that we do get a debt-ceiling deal.”) If nobody takes initiative, the host may suggest some bets. (“You two have radically different expectations for a debt-ceiling deal. Why don’t you each put some money behind it?”) Then next week we see how everybody’s bets are doing.

Each week, we’ll see who really believes their own rhetoric. (If you’re just trying to get attention with your predictions, like Dick Morris with his “Romney landslide” nonsense, it’ll be obvious once the betting phase starts.) And over the course of a season, we’ll see who really knows what they’re talking about.

It’s kind of a reality-TV version of Intrade.

When violent crime started going down in the 90s, everybody had an explanation. Most of them would have predicted the crime rate to increase again by now, which hasn’t happened. But one explanation keeps gathering more and more evidence: changing to unleaded gasoline in the 1970s. Lead in a child’s bloodstream, it turns out, inhibits the growth of the part of the brain that controls aggression.

Remember this example the next time somebody tells you about the “cost” government regulations impose on the economy. That’s not just lost money. We bought something with it.

It’s looking like the election debacle has taken a long-term toll on Fox News.

Let’s end with something pretty: New Years in Dubai.

January 7, 2013 – 1:21 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

One Nation, Under Guard: fantasy, reality, and Sandy Hook

A special kind of panic results when fear mixes with helplessness.

Big plane crashes are like that. You hear about one and you can’t help thinking about the last time you flew or the reservations you already have. You wonder what you would do if your airliner started going down.

In my imagination, I do nothing of any practical use: Scream. Pray. Tell myself it’s not happening. Maybe hold hands with my wife (if we happen to be traveling together) and wait to die.

Panic like that isn’t put aside by statistics. Either it fades with time, or you raise enough courage to overcome it and get on with life. Or you do something that lets you tell yourself (maybe falsely) that the world is different now, so the possibility that panicked you can’t happen any more.

Very often, the something is stupid, like canceling a plane trip and driving instead. Never mind that driving is more dangerous than flying. You’ll die with a steering wheel in your hands rather than falling helplessly out of the sky. The horrible fantasy is calmed.

Because that’s what the something is really about. If you can also make the world safer for yourself or your loved ones, great. But if you can’t, you still need to quiet the horror in your mind.

School shootings are like that. Every day, you drop your kids off at school — knowing, at some level, that you’re surrendering your ability to protect them. But you put that aside: It’s OK. They’re safe. Nothing will happen.

Until something happens. Probably it happens to somebody else and you see it on TV, but it happens. And you can’t get the horrible image out of your head: your precious little son or daughter crouched behind a desk, hearing the gunfire, waiting to die.

To a lesser extent, any public shooting is like that. It could be you, huddling behind a table at Food Court at the Mall, while a gunman walks your way, shooting one person after another. Or maybe you’re huddling behind your seat at the theater or behind your shopping cart at the supermarket. Then, there will be nothing you can do.

And that’s why it feels so important to do something now. Something. Anything. Even if it’s stupid.

Any rational discussion of the Sandy Hook shooting needs to start by acknowledging that psychological reality: We are, at every moment of our lives, helpless against the full range of bad things that could happen. The next person you see could pull out a gun and start blasting, or set off a suicide-bomber vest, or breathe some killer microbe into your airspace. The food you buy could be poison. A chemical spill could send a toxic cloud blowing your way. Nuclear war could start. A meteor could fall out of the blue sky. Even if the environment around you is perfectly safe, your heart (at any moment) could find reasons of its own to stop beating.

To a certain extent, you are never safe and you are always helpless. That’s the human condition.

Other than saints, bodhisattvas, and stoic philosophers, we spend about 99% of our lives in denial of that basic fact. Big public disasters — Sandy Hook, Aurora, 9-11 — break through our denial and cause panic. Panic makes us want to do something. Anything.

Sometimes there’s something sensible to do. Our air safety regulations, for example, have done a lot of good. You know how many people in the United States died in commercial air crashes in 2012? Two. Air bags, antilock brakes, and other car safety changes (plus better emergency response) have dropped the number of automobile-accident deaths in the U.S. from 54,000 in 1972 to 32,000 in 2011, despite having more people, cars, and passenger miles.

But sometimes we’re just making ourselves feel better without improving our safety at all. That’s the question to keep in mind as you think about responses to Sandy Hook: Are we actually improving safety, or are we just banishing a horrible fantasy?

The “solutions” put forward by the NRA and other gun advocates are almost entirely about banishing horrible fantasy. NRA President Wayne LaPierre:

when you hear the glass breaking in your living room at 3 a.m. and call 911, you won’t be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough to protect you.

Yep. You’ll be helpless, waiting to die. Then you’ll wish you had a gun. Just like when your airliner is crashing, you’ll wish you had driven instead. You’ll wish you had a steering wheel to twist and a brake pedal to stomp on.

Owning a gun is exactly the same kind of “solution” as driving instead of flying. Statistically, a household with a gun is far more likely to experience a violent death than a household without a gun. Maybe you’ll worry less about the sound of breaking glass at night — or maybe you’ll lose just as much sleep worrying about how fast you can get to your gun and whether you’ll win the shootout with the intruder —  but a gun won’t make your family safer.

Thinking of you, sis.

I don’t know of any statistical study, but I’ll place my bet that arming teachers or deploying armed guards in schools won’t make kids safer either. Picture the elementary school teachers you know personally. I’m picturing my sister. She’s going to shoot it out with a guy in body armor wielding a Bushmaster? Seriously?

Once you put a gun in a classroom — or a home or a supermarket — all kinds of things can go wrong. This is a big country with a lot of classrooms. Some of those things will go wrong somewhere.

Open carry is now legal in Oklahoma. Feel safer?

And what have we solved? We have banished the particular fantasy of a gunman shooting up a school (unless an armed guard or teacher goes nuts). But have we made it significantly harder to kill large numbers of children, if somebody is determined to do that? Or are we going to have to put armed guards everywhere that children gather? Or are we all going to carry guns to protect ourselves against all the other gunmen?

Is that the society you want your child to grow up in?

There’s been a lot of bad writing on both sides of this issue, but a few pieces here and there have been worth recommending. The best stuff gets past the horrible-fantasy stage and gives you something serious to think about.

Firmin DeBrabander goes directly at the what-kind-of-society question, and argues that guns do exactly the opposite of what the NRA contends: They decrease freedom, diminish democracy, and make dictatorship that much easier. Our front line of defense against violence is that we live in a civil society. If arming everyone undoes civility, then we are much less safe, no matter how well armed we are.

Private gun ownership … nourishes the illusion that I can be my own police, or military … Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism. It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite.

Bad anti-gun writing usually comes from people who have never touched a gun in their lives. (Personally, I’ve shot a variety of guns, but not often, and I’m no kind of expert.) Dan Baum is not that guy. His 2010 article Happiness is a Worn Gun describes his experience training for a concealed-carry permit and then carrying his gun for several months.

The big thing that comes through is that concealed-carry isn’t just a plan, it’s a worldview. His training classes “were less about self-defense than about recruiting us into a culture animated by fear of violent crime.” Baum eventually stops carrying his gun, because he doesn’t like the way it changes his experience from Condition White (everyday awareness) to Condition Yellow (constant threat-monitoring).

Condition White may make us sheep, but it’s also where art happens. It’s where we daydream, reminisce, and hear music in our heads. Hard-core gun carriers want no part of that, and the zeal for getting everybody to carry a gun may be as much an anti-Condition White movement as anything else — resentment toward the airy-fairy elites who can enjoy the luxury of musing, sipping tea, and nibbling biscuits while the good people of the world have to work for a living and keep their guard up.

The best thing I read was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ On Living Armed. As a person who grew up in a violent neighborhood, Coates directly confronts the what-if-you-faced-a-shooter fantasy and expands it.

one does not simply do violence – or live prepared for violence – and remain the same. I carry all of West Baltimore with me, and I am in constant conversation over the fact that that part of me is wholly inappropriate for this world. That part – the part that is analyzing every person who walks up on me, who is trying to figure out every angle, who sees a crowd and walks the other way – is fit for a world of violence. That pose is totally draining. (It has no time to go off and learn French.)

So if you ask me if I wished to have a gun when an active shooter is present, then I will tell you that guns don’t magically appear in the holster, that the capacity to do lethal violence requires an expense of time, energy, and responsibility, which I would rather not make. I would tell you that I have, already, spent too much of my life preparing for violence. I would say that the person who should wish to have a gun in that situation, should be a person capable of shooting a gun, and a person comfortable with the responsibility of carrying a gun during the 99.9 percent of the time when violence – much less lethal violence – is wholly inappropriate.

A gun is power. And power demands responsibility. I don’t want to spend my time that way.

January 7, 2013 – 12:20 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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Avoid the cliff, hit the ceiling

I admit it: I expected House Republicans to reject the last-minute Biden/McConnell deal (that passed the Senate 89-8) and send us over the fiscal cliff.

Instead, they did one of those having-it-both-ways things that makes people despise politicians: Within their own caucus, Republicans voted to let the bill come to the floor, where (led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor) most of them voted against it. So they knew it was necessary and wanted it to pass, but they also wanted to be able to deny supporting it.

The WP’s Wonkblog summarizes what’s in the deal and charts how it affects the national debt. (Short version: The tax hikes and spending cuts that constituted the fiscal cliff would have cut the annual deficit more, but this is a middling path between that and the status quo.)

The chart on the right has way too much jargon, but it’s showing debt-as-a-percentage-of-GDP over time under various scenarios. The top line is roughly cancel-the-fiscal-cliff-and-let-things-go-on-as-they-were and the bottom is go-over-the-cliff. The red, green, blue, and purple lines are where we’re headed now under various scenarios.

So who won? Nobody yet. This deal solved the question of the Bush tax cuts, but it delayed the spending-cut decisions until March, when they will run up against another debt-ceiling showdown.

Republicans are claiming that the debt ceiling is a better battleground for them, and believe they’ll get the kind of concessions out of Obama that they got in 2011. Obama thinks the public was disgusted with the 2011 shenanigans and won’t stand for the Republicans taking the world economy hostage again. (Until 2011, raising the debt limit was an opportunity to score rhetorical points, but no one ever seriously proposed not doing it or extracted any concessions in exchange for doing it.)

So who won in this deal depends on who is right about their advantages in the next deal. Greg Sargent writes:

the major fight at the heart of this whole mess — over the proper scope and role of the safety net of the 21st century, and who will pay for it — remains unresolved. Only the outcome of that battle can settle the question of whether today’s compromise was a good one for liberals.

And Kos of Daily Kos agrees:

Whatever argument we’re going to have, it shouldn’t be whether this deal is good or bad. It’s over whether Obama will eventually cave or not.

Do it like this, Mr. President

I’d like to see Obama include an Eastwood-like make-my-day paragraph in the State of the Union: “You want to blow up the global economy if you don’t get your way? Go ahead. Show the world what kind of people you really are.”

I think this is a necessary and (eventually) inevitable confrontation. For that reason, I’ve soured on tricks like the trillion-dollar coin to finesse around the debt ceiling. Kevin Drum explains how that trick distorts the intention of the law, and so puts Obama in the position of trying to pull something rather than calling the Republicans on pulling something. I don’t want him to sacrifice his integrity to avoid paying blackmail; that’s just another kind of blackmail payment.

Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to minimize the consequences of not raising the debt limit. Senator Cornyn writes:

The coming deadlines will be the next flashpoints in our ongoing fight to bring fiscal sanity to Washington. It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country, rather than plod along the path of Greece, Italy and Spain. President Obama needs to take note of this reality and put forward a plan to avoid it immediately.

(President Obama, of course, has put forward a plan: Congress should raise the debt ceiling the way it always did until 2011.) And Senator Toomey said:

A temporary disruption because we have to furlough the workers at the Department of Education, or close down some national parks, or not cut the grass on the Mall, that’s not optimal, it’s disruptive, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the path that we’re on.

The problem is temporary and minor only if you assume that Obama quickly folds once he discovers that Republicans are serious. But what if Obama is serious too? The 14th Amendment (section 4) requires that the government keep paying interest on its debt and principle on bonds as they come due. But how long before we have to shut down the National Weather Service or the Center for Disease Control or the TSA?

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who’s reminded of one particular movie scene. Greg Sargent quotes an email he got from former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger:

The whole thing reminds me of the great moment in “Blazing Saddles” when Sheriff Bart takes himself hostage by pointing a gun at his own head. The simple townsfolk of Rock Ridge were dumb enough to fall for it. Are we?

The Tea Partiers have talked themselves into the idea that this would be the Lesser Apocalypse compared to the spending binge that is about to turn us into Greece. Kevin Drum debunks:

The facts are pretty clear. Spending isn’t our big problem. The recession spike of 2008 aside, it’s about the same as it was 30 years ago. But instead of paying for that spending, we’ve repeatedly cut taxes, which are now at their lowest level in half a century.

You’ll see an early sign of who’s going to win in how the mainstream media identifies the hostage in this crisis. If the hostage is “government” — a separate entity unrelated to the rest of us — then the Tea Party will win. If the hostage is “the country” or “the economy”, then Obama will win.

January 7, 2013 – 10:30 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

After taking Christmas Eve off and using New Year’s Eve to review the year, I’ve fallen behind on two major stories: (1) the Obama vs Tea Party conflict we used to call “the fiscal cliff”, but we’re now calling “the debt ceiling”; (2) the post-Sandy-Hook discussion about guns.

So today I’ll try to catch up. The cliff/ceiling article should go up first, probably in an hour or two. The gun article is still in notes and fragments, so it may not appear until after noon.

January 7, 2013 – 6:59 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment