How Lies Work

If you’ve ever seen a five-year-old stand over a broken vase and say, “I didn’t do it”, you might think lying is easy. But as Mark Twain observed: “An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.”

Effective lying in a political campaign is very hard work. The soil has to be tilled and the lie planted just so. You have to water it over and over again. And then, at just the right moment, you add that special ingredient that makes it sprout and flower.

Let’s look at the most effective lie currently spreading: President Obama is a threat to your Medicare. I live in a swing state (New Hampshire), so I’ve been seeing it in this ad:

At first glance, this looks like a rubber/glue lie: The guy who wants to turn Medicare into a privatized voucher program and then not fund it properly is Paul Ryan. How can the Romney/Ryan campaign turn that around and make themselves the defenders of Medicare?

They’re doing it, and it seems to be working. I can feel the pull of their ad, even though I know it’s false. How does that work? It’s a master class in propaganda.

Start with a kernel of truth. Whether or not you believe that current deficits are necessary to stimulate the economy, you should worry about the rising cost of health care: It’s not just that in the long run Medicare, Medicaid, and veteran’s medical benefits threaten to swamp the federal budget, it’s that health-care spending in general threatens to swamp the economy.

You can get spending growth down in two ways: Reform the system to deliver care more efficiently or deliver less care. The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) pushes the deliver-more-efficiently approach. Medicare benefits don’t change, but hospitals get reimbursed less for delivering them. (Some of the profit built into hospital payments covers the emergency-room costs of the uninsured. ObamaCare lowers the number of uninsured, so hospitals don’t need to charge the insured as much.) Also, the government curtails Medicare Advantage, a wasteful Republican attempt to build a private option into Medicare. (The private plans cost more, because the private sector is less efficient at things like this. The government has been picking up the difference.)

The result is an estimated $716 billion in savings over ten years.

That’s the kernel of truth: Because of ObamaCare, the government will spend $716 billion less on Medicare.

Till the dirty soil. Bad propaganda boomerangs, because people who recognize your ugly falsehoods resent you for telling them. So you never want to be caught telling a nasty lie.

However … you can’t be blamed for the false information, irrational prejudices, and ugly stereotypes that already sit inside people’s heads, waiting to be exploited. So good propaganda contains only enough false or repulsive information to leverage the ignorance and misinformation that’s already out there.

If you want to convince people that President Obama is sabotaging the Medicare they deserve, you’ve got a lot to work with.

Obama is black. Romney doesn’t say, “You can’t trust Obama because he’s black”, because even whites who don’t trust blacks would be horrified to hear it said out loud. In this post-civil-rights-movement era, it’s rare to meet an open I-hate-niggers racist.

Still, race matters. White America does not give Obama the level of trust or respect a white president of either party would get. (Picture the outrage if a black congressman had interrupted President Bush’s state-of-the-union address by yelling, “You lie!”) And it’s different when blacks do things we accept whites doing. (Picture armed blacks protesting in a Tea-Party-like manner, with signs calling for revolution. Picture a black senate candidate threatening “second amendment solutions” if his side loses the election.)

You till this soil by talking about how “foreign” Obama is, and how someone needs to teach him “how to be an American“. If you just imply “Obama isn’t like you”, many whites will fill in the racist parts for themselves.

Blacks are lazy. They want the government to give them what white people earned. When Newt Gingrich calls Obama “the Food Stamp president”, he’s counting on his audience to fill this in. If they aren’t making the racial connection, Gingrich gives a nudge:

I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.

How did the NAACP get into this? Did they ever say they prefer food stamps to paychecks? No? Then what’s Newt talking about?

Ditto when Rick Santorum said:

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.

In context, that statement is a complete non sequitur unless the government-gives-white-money-to-blacks idea is sitting your head.

Romney himself has tilled this ground with the Obama-gutted-welfare’s-work-requirement lie, which he dispatched Gingrich to defend.

 

Liberals favor people who don’t work over people who work. They’ve been tilling this one for years. But the weekend, overtime pay, safe workplaces, and Social Security and Medicare themselves — those are liberal ideas. Conservatives were against them every step of the way.

Nobody knows what’s hidden in the Affordable Care Act’s 2000 pages. Of course, if it had been 10 pages critics could say, “Nobody knows how ObamaCare will be implemented, because they left out all the details.” There’s always an angle.

This ground was tilled with Sarah Palin’s “death panel” lie — Politifact’s 2009 Lie of the Year.

As a result, many of the simple things the ACA does are not understood — like getting rid of the donut hole in Medicare prescription drug coverage. (That’s just one of the benefits seniors get from the bill. It isn’t “not for you”.) The pieces of ObamaCare are actually fairly popular, when people find out what they are.

The middle class is vanishing because all the money is going to poor people. In reality, all the money is going to rich people, but that process is complicated. The story that your hard-earned money is being taxed away and given to layabouts is much easier to understand.

A bunch of related misconceptions help out, like “Illegal immigrants steal our jobs.” The common element is that if you’re looking for someone to resent, look down, not up. The rich are heroes, “job creators” — not vultures who made a killing outsourcing everything to China.

Plant. Now look at what the Romney ad says: You (an aging white man) paid into Medicare “every paycheck” (because you worked for a living). But now Obama has siphoned $716 billion of those dollars into ObamaCare, a “massive new government program” which is “not for you”.

So who is it for? People not like you — the young, the non-white, the people who didn’t work.

Years of effort have pushed the idea that ObamaCare is a suspicious program put forward by an illegitimate president in order to give healthcare away to people who don’t work. If you’ve been buying the Republican message so far, you’ve been expecting something like what this ad is telling you.

Supply “independent” verification. Most people are too smart to believe something just because a TV ad says so. Instead, they look for independent verification. So they shrug off the claim that something is “the #1 movie in America” until they find out whether anybody at work has seen it.

But Americans have a lot less direct human contact than they used to. The difference is taken up by voices on the radio or emails from strangers who sound real. Many of them are not real, and conservatives have learned to exploit this avenue of false verification.

Last November, a “brain surgeon” called in to the Mark Levin show to say that ObamaCare would deny brain surgery to anyone over 70. He had the inside scoop, because he’d just come from a American Association of Neuro-Surgeons meeting where the new HHS guidelines document had circulated.

A viral email picked that up, amplified it, and kept people accessing the clip online. A hospital employee heard a doctor repeat it.

It was all fake. There was no meeting; there was no document; the guy who called in wasn’t a brain surgeon. He was just a voice in the ether, telling you something that somebody wanted you to believe.

Now this is going around:

Your Medicare premiums are going to double because of ObamaCare! There it is — the exact numbers! — independently verified by somebody who leaked the information out of BlueCross. But it hasn’t appeared publicly because of Obama’s 2012 campaign!

Except … it’s all fake. BlueCross has nothing to do with it. The numbers are made up.

It’s just something somebody wants you to believe. And it rockets around the country from cousin to co-worker to classmate. Inside information! Conveniently verifying the false thing that Mitt Romney is telling you.

No one knows how many of these fakes are out there, and by the time they get noticed and debunked the deed is done.

Nobody has succeeded in tracing such hoaxes back their sources, other than to note that they are overwhelmingly conservative. But they can’t just happen. No one can accidentally create such well-designed lies.

Don’t underestimate the power of lies. You may see some ad like Romney’s and say, “Nobody’s going to buy that.” But the ad is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the visible piece of a complete propaganda campaign, much of which happens in places you don’t see.

August 20, 2012 – 12:26 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

Tagged , , , |

Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women

tumblr_m8rxr8rmj71rdkw6yo1_500

Right after Paul Ryan was named as Mitt Romney’s VP, I did what every other political blogger in the world did: wrote an article almost entirely about his economic policies. Of course I did and we did. In minds of politics-watchers everywhere, Ryan means the Ryan budget, with its strange combination of bold detail and cowardly vagueness. Just mentioning Ryan’s name launches an argument about taxes and Medicare and long-term deficits.

But a day or two later, I felt a wave of deja vu. Isn’t this exactly what happened in 2009 and 2010?

The Tea Party. Remember? The Tea Party burst onto the scene in April, 2009, billing itself as a non-partisan, grass-roots movement of people fed up with taxes and deficits. Taxed Enough Already — remember? The culture wars could wait; the problems of debt and government spending were too urgent.

An occasional liberal Jeremiah tried to warn us how phony this framing was, but for the most part we let them get away with it.

And then what happened? As soon as the election was over and Republicans (so much for non-partisan) controlled the House in D.C. and the entire state government in places like Wisconsin and Florida, their first priorities turned out to be abortion and all the other “values” issues they had swept under the rug during the campaign.

As the new Congress was settling in, Rep. Mike Pence segued like this:

Our economy is struggling and our national government is awash in a sea of debt. Amidst these struggles, some would have us focus our energies on jobs and spending. … I agree. Let’s start by denying all federal funding for abortion at home and abroad. The largest abortion provider in America should not also be the largest recipient of federal funding under Title X. The time has come to deny any and all federal funding to Planned Parenthood of America.

Annual Planned Parenthood funding under Title X was about $70 million. Take that, trillion-dollar deficit!

Rachel Maddow was one of the early major-media people to sound the alarm, in a series of segments she labelled Really, Really Big Government.

That is the message they campaigned on in November—freedom, liberty, letting people do what they want!

And then they arrived in Washington and immediately started working on putting government in charge of every single pregnancy in America. Even as they slowed the legislative calendar way down, stopped doing much of anything else, they advanced not one, not two, but three super radical bills to restrict abortion rights.

Ryan’s Role. Paul Ryan was co-sponsoring every one of the Religious Right’s “super radical bills”. The National Right to Life Committee says:

Ryan has maintained a 100 percent pro-life voting record on all roll call votes scored by National Right to Life through his entire tenure in the House, which began in 1999.

It’s important to understand just how radical the recent stuff is, because we’re used to the abortion struggle taking place on a fairly small battlefield — Medicaid funding, late-term abortions, parental notification — where the issues really are debatable. But since the Tea Party came into power, we’ve been fighting over issues that used to be on the fringe or completely off the table.

Forced ultrasounds. The general public didn’t catch on to the changing battlelines until women protested the Virginia forced transvaginal ultrasound law this March: In the original version of the bill, women seeking an abortion would be forced to have an ultrasound probe shoved up their vaginas. (Texas already started enforcing a similar law in February.) The legislature had no medical justification; they just figured women who want to abort are too dumb to understand what a fetus is unless the government forces them to look. Or maybe the point is to humiliate women before granting them their constitutional rights.

Maddow and others began calling Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell “Governor Ultrasound” — a nickname that probably pushed him off Romney’s VP short list.

Well, Paul Ryan is Congressman Ultrasound. He co-sponsored the federal Ultrasound Informed Consent Act. Women would be forced to submit to and pay for a medically unnecessary procedure because Paul Ryan believes they’re “uninformed”. (I wonder how he’d feel about making anybody who wants to buy a gun observe the autopsy of a gunshot victim. Don’t they deserve to be “informed” too?)

Rights for single-celled organisms. Another radical addition to the abortion debate are “personhood” laws, which define a fertilized ovum as a human being deserving the full protection of the laws.

Such a law would not only outlaw all abortions, it would also ban any form of birth control that works by interfering with the zygote’s ability to implant in the uterus — like the Pill.

The birth control pill, for example, prevents pregnancy in three ways: The pill thickens the cervical mucus to make it more difficult for sperm to reach the egg; it suppresses ovulation by mimicking pregnancy-level hormones in the body, preventing eggs from being released from the ovaries; and finally, as a fail-safe, the pill makes the lining of the uterus inhospitable to any fertilized egg that might slip through. The time between fertilization and implantation (when a pregnancy becomes medically detectable) usually takes about a week.

In public, advocates of personhood bills deny they’d ban the Pill. But among themselves they sound more like this:

A justly written personhood amendment should ultimately outlaw all abortions  including both the intentionally induced “miscarriages” of the hormonal birth control pill and the blatant infanticide of the partial birth abortion.

Personhood laws would also outlaw in vitro fertilization as currently practiced, because the test-tube zygotes that aren’t implanted must eventually be destroyed. A pro-life article that tries to dispel this “absurdity” actually verifies it:

Couples trying to get pregnant through IVF procedures would have nothing to fear from Personhood legislation unless they consented to the intentional destruction of their embryonic children. [emphasis added]

Who would support such a radical law? Not voters. No personhood referendum has come close to passing, even in Mississippi.

But Paul Ryan is a more radical culture warrior than the average Mississippian. He co-sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which says:

the Congress declares that … the life of each human being begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, irrespective of sex, health, function or disability, defect, stage of biological development, or condition of dependency, at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood

Ryan’s defenders sometimes claim this bill merely empowers states to protect the personhood rights of fertilized ova, but it says what it says. If this passed, how long would it take the Thomas More Society to file a class-action suit against birth-control-pill manufacturers on behalf of zygotes?

Employers’ Rights Trump Workers’ Rights. Ryan voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that eliminated a hole in the equal-pay-for-women laws.

Ryan also co-sponsored the Religious Freedom Tax Repeal Act of 2012. Motivated by the concerns trumped up against ObamaCare’s contraception mandate — Wheaton College had to stop covering contraception so that it could join the lawsuit against being forced to cover contraception — Ryan’s bill goes way beyond that case, to prevent the government from enforcing any coverage “if an employer with respect to such plan is opposed to such coverage by reason of adherence to a religious belief or moral conviction.”

So the Christian Science Monitor wouldn’t have to cover any cancer treatment beyond prayer. And what if an employer just has a “moral conviction” against spending money on workers?

In his own voice. Finding Ryan’s name in a list of co-sponsors doesn’t tell you much about his level of commitment or the thinking behind it. For that you have to turn to his writings and speeches.

In September, 2010 (when the Tea Party was playing down culture-war issues) Ryan wrote The Cause of Life Can’t Be Severed From the Cause of Freedom, which explains why “freedom” requires forcing women to obey the tenets of Ryan’s religion.

I recommend reading the entire article, because you will learn a lot about how Ryan’s mind works. No actual pregnant women are mentioned or even imagined. His argument is entirely abstract; the lives and situations of real people carry no weight.

What’s more — and this style is very familiar if (like me and Paul Ryan) you read way too much Ayn Rand in high school — all the important ideas are hidden in the framing, so the argument consists entirely of tautologies. (The third and concluding part of Atlas Shrugged is titled “A is A”, as if something important could be deduced from that.)

So how does Ryan defend the absurd idea that zygotes deserve all the rights of fully-developed human beings? He doesn’t; he just labels them “people” and then defends the rights of people. He compares Roe v Wade to Dred Scott — there being no noteworthy differences between black slaves and single-celled organisms — and concludes:

I cannot believe any official or citizen can still defend the notion that an unborn human being has no rights that an older person is bound to respect. I do know that we cannot go on forever feigning agnosticism about who is human.

Zygotes have rights because “I cannot believe” otherwise. And if you claim not to believe it, or not to be certain enough to use government power to force women to bear their rapists’ babies, you are “feigning”. Ryan knows you agree with him deep down; you’re just pretending not to.

That’s how he thinks.

And if he ever ascends to the presidency, or if he becomes the family-values point man in a Romney administration, that’s the level of public debate we can expect.

August 20, 2012 – 9:47 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

Tagged , , , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

This week everybody was still talking about Paul Ryan, and the Romney campaign tried to muddy the waters by arguing that President Obama — and not Paul Ryan — is the real threat to Medicare.

If you’re not plugged in to the world of untraceable viral emails and fake people calling in to talk-radio shows, you might not realize just how involved the Romney Medicare deception is or how effective it could be. It’s a real lesson in propaganda that I’ll try to unravel in “How Lies Work”.

This week’s other main article is a follow-up to last week’s I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To, which became the second most popular Sift post of 2012. In capturing the buzz about Ryan, I followed the mainstream pundits into a trap: I ignored Ryan’s record as a radical culture warrior.

That’s the mistake the public made with the Tea Party in 2010; we bought their “Taxed Enough Already” schtick and were surprised when their vision of “small government” included forced transvaginal ultrasounds. So like The Who, I’m praying we don’t get fooled again. That’s why this week’s other main article is “Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women”.

The Ryan article should be up in a few minutes, but “How Lies Work” will take a little bit longer.

August 20, 2012 – 8:26 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

If They Win

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.

— Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker
(last week, when Ryan was still a long shot VP choice)

This week everybody was talking about Paul Ryan

Saturday, Mitt Romney did what any good CEO would do: His brand was sinking because it lacked any core convictions, so he arranged a merger to acquire some. I don’t have to play pundit here, because so many good observations have already been made that I can just collect the ten best in I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To.

… but I also wrote about terrorism

In particular, what happens when the terrorist looks just like the viewing majority? Well, the media has to explain that away somehow. I named my article after the phrase you’ll never hear on mainstream TV: White Right-wing Christian Terrorist.

… and you might also find this stuff interesting

In Ohio, if you live in a Republican county, you’ll have extended hours for early voting. If you live in a Democratic county, you’ll probably have to take time out of the work day. Remember that if Romney wins the election because he carries Ohio by 500 votes.

Two weeks ago I talked about how transparent markets help producers and consumers, while opaque markets favor middlemen who can build near monopolies.

Thursday’s NYT had an article about a major loss of transparency that is coming to a market near you: Supermarkets can now crunch data about you on the fly, and offer you a different price than the one on the shelves.

Of course, if a retailer can reward you for a buying pattern it likes, it can also punish you for a buying pattern it dislikes. Imagine: “I went to the farmer’s market last week, and now I’m paying full price for everything.”

If you’ve finished all the beach-reading you planned to do this summer, I’ve got a couple more serious recent novels to suggest:

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. The best line about this novel is that it’s “as if Dickens had written The Godfather and placed it in India”. The biography of a Mumbai gangster forms the trellis, but around it climb the vines of a Sikh policeman, a Bollywood star, and dozens of other fascinating people. Along the way it becomes obvious that there’s a Mumbai Dream, and it’s not all that different from one version of the American Dream. People want to go where the bright lights are and become Somebody. But when it works, is that Somebody still you? (As a bonus, you’ll learn how to swear in Hindi like a Mumbai cop.)

A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois. This has been out just long enough for my local library to get a copy. It’s two stories that converge: a 30-year-old American woman who knows she just has a year or two before the Huntington’s disease that killed her father starts to take her mind away, and a Russian chess-champion-turned-political-dissident who is modeled so closely on Garry Kasparov that some of the specific chess games match up. She knows she can’t beat her disease; he knows he can’t beat Putin — what do you do with that? (The bonus here is Dubois’ way with words. She can evoke a complicated situation with deceptively simple language. At one point, for example, the female narrator notices that a man is “looking at me the way that men looked at me back when men looked at me.”)

Following up on last week’s “The Looming Software Catastrophe“, here’s an NYT article about the impossibility of testing software like the automatic trading program that brought down Knight Capital.

The ultimate success or failure of ObamaCare rests on how effectively it can bring down costs without explicit care-rationing. Just as Massachusetts’ RomneyCare was the model before, its cost-containment program could be the model now.

The Pope will now accept people using condoms to avoid spreading AIDS. But the ridged and flavored ones are still right out.

So a Mennonite minister is on trial for helping an “ex-lesbian” mother kidnap her own child to keep her away from the mother’s former same-sex partner. Naturally, this reminds Focus on the Family’s Bryan Fischer of the underground railroad. He thinks organized kidnapping of children would be a good thing.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Sift has been way too serious this week. Let’s close with something fun:

August 13, 2012 – 12:17 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Post a comment

White Right-Wing Christian Terrorist

Tuesday, when CBS News did a segment on the man who killed seven at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, one word was conspicuously absent: terrorist. All the pieces to make that judgment were in place: Wade Michael Page had a long history in white supremacist groups. (The album covers of his white-supremacist bands are pictured at the bottom of this article, where you can easily avoid looking at them.) His victims were non-Christian and non-white, and they gathered at a non-Christian temple.

His massacre was violence against civilians, apparently for the political purpose of terrorizing the racial or religious groups they belong to. That’s terrorism.

No white Christian terrorists. But the mainstream media doesn’t often call white Christians terrorists, and even if they express their motives in Christian or white-supremacist terms, you seldom run across the phrase “white Christian terrorist”. Almost by definition, terrorists are Muslims. And conversely, violent Muslims are terrorists.

When someone does tie a terrorist act to Christianity, you can count on seeing a lot of pushback — articles begging for nuance, emphasizing how out of the Christian mainstream the terrorist’s views are, refusing to take seriously a childhood connection to Christianity, and instead demanding specific evidence of a religious motive (which hasn’t shown up yet in Page’s case). Again, these principles don’t apply when the killer has brown skin and a Muslim name.

The white killer also gets portrayed with more sympathy. The CBS report includes pictures of Page as a cute boy, and shows his step-mother describing him as “kind and gentle and loving”.

I’ll bet Khalid Sheik Mohammed was a cute child once, but this is the picture of him I’ve seen over and over.

No right-wing terrorists. You also don’t hear the term “right-wing terrorist” very often. In 2009, a report by the Department of Homeland Security called attention to the problem of right-wing violence, and identified “disgruntled military veterans” as targets for recruitment by right-wing hate groups. It quoted a civil rights organization:

large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.

The potential recruits were “a small percentage” of veterans, but a small percentage of a large number can still be disturbingly large.

Page was precisely the kind of veteran the report was talking about. But it’s too late for the report’s author (Daryl Johnson) to get credit in DHS, because he’s long gone. The report raised a furor in the right-wing media, which interpreted it as a slander against both veterans and the rising Tea Party movement.

Michelle Malkin wrote in the Washington Times:

It’s no small coincidence that Ms. Napolitano’s agency disseminated the assessment just a week before the nationwide April 15 Tax Day Tea Party protests.

Her column ended: “We are all right-wing extremists now. Welcome to the club.” That message was echoed by Fox News and Republican leaders: Right-wing terrorism was something the Obama administration dreamed up to slander all conservatives.

DHS responded to the furor by dissolving Johnson’s team, and Johnson himself left DHS a year after the report was published.

What I think is going on. There is an underlying narrative in mainstream culture that People Like You are threatened by People Like Them. If a story fits neatly into that frame, then OK, go with it.

But if the obvious interpretation of an event is that People Like You are the threat, that’s a problem. Nobody wants to hear that. And so Juan Cole’s Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others includes:

6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.

 Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf puts it like this:

Watching Oak Creek, that subset of Americans was put in a position to realize that a day prior they’d have identified with the terrorist more than his victims. And so they quickly looked away.

Instead, we want to hear that the Threatening One is really not like us after all. He’s not a member of a group; he’s a loner. He’s not acting on beliefs that we share; he’s crazy. And his action is not a one-sided eruption of our hate onto their innocence; he’s a tortured soul who once had the potential for goodness; the suffering he inflicts arises from his own suffering.

The same thing happens on smaller scales. A couple years ago, the director of my church’s religious education program was describing the articles she’d been reading about bullying. They all discussed how to help your child deal with being bullied. “None of them,” she told me, “addressed the possibility that your child might be the bully.”

But the bully is always someone’s child. And no one wants to hear that.

August 13, 2012 – 11:31 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

Tagged , , , |

I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To

Much ink was spilled this weekend about Paul Ryan. Here are the ten best observations I found:

1. This was Plan B for Romney.

Steve Kornacki:

The most important thing to know about Mitt Romney’s running-mate choice is this: It’s not the move he would have made if the campaign was going the way he hoped it would.

Plan A was to frame the election as Barack Obama vs. Somebody Else, and Mitt all but changed his name to Somebody Else. Beyond a few believe-in-America platitudes, the Romney campaign has been the anti-Obama campaign.

That strategy led to what Ezra Klein called a “policy gap” — not a gap between Obama’s policies and Romney’s policies, but

Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t. … Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals.

Klein gives many examples, including:

On financial regulation, Romney would ‘repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework.’ That is literally his entire plan. Three years after a homegrown financial crisis wrecked the global economy, the likely Republican nominee for president would repeal the new regulatory architecture and replace it with … something.

Romney’s plan to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare is equally light on the “replace” part. The Romney website lists a lot of virtues his plan will have, but only hints at how it will achieve those virtues.

Until Saturday, everything about the Romney candidacy was fuzzy, even whether or not he supports RomneyCare. He bowed to all the conservative icons during the primary campaign, but his Massachusetts record pointed the other way, and Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom indicated that Romney’s primary commitments might be null and void after the convention:

I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

In hindsight, the hole in that strategy is obvious: Not only did this looming betrayal make the base edgy, but Romney’s refusal to define himself let Obama define him as the slash-and-burn financier who destroyed American industry and walked away with all the money.

All summer, Romney has been helpless against the assault. Does he want to make women bear their rapists’ children? Does he want to raise taxes on the middle class? Did he pay any taxes himself? All possible responses would force Mitt to be Somebody, when he really wanted to be Somebody Else.

The results showed up immediately in Romney’s unfavorable rating.

Romney’s overall favorable/unfavorable score remains a net negative – a trait no other modern presumptive GOP presidential nominee (whether Bob Dole, George W. Bush or John McCain) has shared.

And eventually Obama started to pull away in the head-to-head polls.

Time for Plan B.

2. Ryan’s voting record is very, very conservative.

Nate Silver notes that Ryan’s Congressional voting record gives him a DW-Nominate rating “roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann”. Ryan may not be as physically wild-eyed as Bachmann, but ideologically they’re very similar. That makes him the most ideologically extreme VP candidate from Congress since at least 1900. (See chart below.)

Given Mitt’s fuzziness and Ryan’s high-contrast definition, Ryan’s positions are now the Romney-Ryan positions. The Etch-a-Sketch option is gone.

Those Romney-Ryan policies include privatizing Social Security, turning Medicare into a voucher program, and drastically cutting Medicaid. (Ryan hopes that some magic wand at the state level will create efficiencies, but the Urban Institute estimates some 14 million poor people would lose coverage.)

3. Ryan is both a Catholic and a follower of atheist author Ayn Rand.

He’s very anti-abortion but completely ignores the long series of socio-economic encyclicals that started with Pope Leo’s Rerum Novarum in 1891.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote letters criticizing the Ryan budget, which Ryan falsely rejected as not representing “all the Catholic bishops”.

Catholics have a real decision to make in this election. Are they single-issue anti-abortion voters? Or does the Sermon on the Mount still count for something?

4.The Ryan pick focuses the election on the deficit.

Matt Yglesias complains:

focusing attention on the big-picture disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about long-term fiscal policy means we won’t be focusing attention on what ought to be the most pressing economic policy issue of our time—mass unemployment and the tragic waste of human and economic potential it represents.

This cuts both ways. On the one hand, it plays into the popular misconception that lowering the deficit would create jobs. (Both Econ 101 and the experience of Britain say that cutting the deficit will destroy jobs.) That favors Romney.

On the other hand, Obama’s balanced plan for dealing with the long-term deficit is much more credible than the Ryan/Romney plan to cut rich people’s taxes even more, increase defense spending, and make up the difference by closing unspecified loopholes and cutting unspecified spending.

Ezra Klein explains how steep those cuts would have to be:

Ryan says that under his budget, everything the federal government does that is not Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security will be cut to less than 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. That means defense, infrastructure, education, food safety, energy research, national parks, civil service, the FBI — all of it. Right now, that category of spending is 12.5 percent of GDP.

Another way to put 3.75% in context: Romney has already promised to put “a floor of 4 percent of GDP” under the defense budget alone.

5. Ryan’s reputation as a deficit hawk is undeserved.

Ezra Klein:

the real north star of Ryan’s policy record isn’t deficits or spending, though he often uses those concerns in service of his agenda. It’s radically reforming the way the federal government provides public services, usually by privatizing or devolving those public services away from the federal government.

More bluntly: The deficit is just an excuse to shrink government. If the deficit went away, Ryan would rebuild it by cutting rich people’s taxes and letting corporations skim a bigger profit out of public services.

Paul Krugman says Ryan’s budget-sausage contains $4.6 trillion in “mystery meat”: Like Romney, he claims his tax cuts for the rich will be balanced by closing loopholes, but he doesn’t identify any of those loopholes.

We’ve heard this song before: Republicans always claim their tax cuts won’t increase the deficit, but they always do. Reagan’s did, Bush’s did, and Romney’s will too.

They will try to claim that Ryan’s cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and every other non-defense program are necessary to save our children from the deficit. (MoveOn points out the ways in which the cuts harm our children — like making it harder for them to get an education if their parents aren’t rich.) The election probably hangs on making the public realize that those cuts have nothing to do with the deficit and will instead go straight into the pockets of the rich.

Early focus groups indicate that sale won’t be hard for Obama to make.

6. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is. 

Ryan has benefitted from what President Bush (in another context) called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. The prevailing media prejudice is for “balance”. But the reality of the last few years has been a reasonable administration facing an opposition that abandoned anything resembling facts or logic in favor of pure obstructionism and open hatred.

How to balance that? Paul Krugman explains:

What these people need is reasonable Republicans. And if such creatures don’t exist, they have to invent them. Hence the elevation of Ryan — who is, in fact, a garden-variety GOP extremist, but with a mild-mannered style — to icon of fiscal responsibility and honest argument, despite the reality that his proposals are both fiscally irresponsible and quite dishonest.

I don’t think Ryan understands this process, so I expect him to be totally floored when the media starts covering him more rigorously and asking reasonable questions.

The Republican rank-and-file also don’t understand. They believe Ryan is really, really smart and expect him to wipe the floor with that doofus Joe Biden.

I think they’ll be surprised.

7. Ryan is a creature of Washington.

Wisconsin reporter John Nichols describes him as “Dick Cheney with nice hair”.

he is a guy who went to Washington as soon as he could, rooted himself in the establishment, got himself elected as soon as he could and became a major player

Joan Walsh offers him as an example of “the fakery at the heart of the Republican project today”.

The man who wants to make the world safe for swashbuckling, risk-taking capitalists hasn’t spent a day at economic risk in his entire life.

If you want to make an Ayn Rand character out of him, Wesley Mouch is a closer match than John Galt. Walsh continues:

guys like Ryan … somehow become the political face of the white working class when they never spent a day in that class in their life. Their only tether to it is their remarkable ability to tap into the economic anxiety of working class whites and steer it toward paranoia that their troubles are the fault of “other” people – the slackers and the moochers, Ayn Rand’s famous “parasites.”

8. He voted for all the budget-busting policies of the Bush administration.

According to the LA Times, Ryan voted for TARP, the unfunded Bush prescription drug benefit, the Iraq War, and (of course) all the Bush tax cuts.

Deficits only became a problem after Obama was elected

9. Obama owns foreign policy now.

Romney and Ryan look good posing in front of a mothballed battleship, but that’s the only qualification either brings to the job of Leader of the Free World. Meanwhile, Obama is the guy who finally got Bin Laden and ended the unpopular Iraq War.

Thomas Schaller observes that until now

at least one candidate on every GOP presidential ticket during the past half-century could boast at least some foreign policy, diplomatic or defense chops.

Foreign Policy’s Joshua Keating comments:

Romney seems to be wagering that foreign policy will not be a major issue in the campaign.

10. Ryan would be the real power in a Romney administration. And if Romney loses, Ryan is already the front-runner for 2016.

When Romney introduced Ryan as “the next president of the United States” Steve Kornacki heard a Freudian slip:

while it will be the former Massachusetts governor who is sworn-in as the 45thpresident if the GOP ticket prevails this November, it will be Ryan who sets the new administration’s policy direction.

The New Republic’s Michael Kazin predicts Ryan would be more powerful than Dick Cheney.

Republicans have never before nominated someone for V.P. in hopes that he, and not the would-be President, would define the critical domestic policies of the entire federal government.

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner agrees:

Republicans envision an administration in which Romney has relegated
himself to a kind of head of state role … with Ryan as the actual head of government

Why? Well, Ryan has a philosophy and a real constituency in the Party and in Congress. He also carries the standard of the Koch brothers. Romney has none of that.

Already on Saturday, Nate Silver tweeted:

If Obama wins, most likely 2016 match-up is: Paul Ryan vs. Hillary Clinton. That would be pretty epic.

Kornacki describes Ryan 2016 as “the Right’s long game”.

But even if Ryan’s budget proves an albatross for Romney and the GOP ticket goes down, it’s not hard to see conservatives rationalizing away the defeat: The problem was Romney couldn’t sell the message – that’s why the next time we need Ryan at the top of the ticket!

After all, right-wingers still haven’t admitted that Palin was a liability to McCain. As Digby put it years ago: “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.”

August 13, 2012 – 9:00 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

Tagged , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

This weekend, every pundit in the world wrote about Paul Ryan. A lot of it was repetitive and some was drivel, but I sifted through it to pull out ten points you need to understand. That article, “I Read About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To”, takes up most of this week’s Sift.

A shorter second article looks at a subtle way racism and religious prejudice seep into news coverage: The more we learn more about the guy who murdered six people at the Sikh Temple, the more tangled up he is in white supremacism. And yet the media rarely describes him as a “terrorist”, much less a “white terrorist” or a “Christian terrorist”. But it’s hard to imagine that if a dark-skinned Muslim had shot up a Christian church, he would be portrayed as a “troubled young man”. His connection to radical groups and movements would be central to the story, not symptoms of some underlying mental disorder.

I’m pretty much on schedule this morning, so I hope to get everything posted by noon.

August 13, 2012 – 7:04 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

On and On

The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

—   Robert Kennedy (1968), two months before his assassination,

Among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.

— Abraham Lincoln (1863), quoted by Kennedy in the same speech

This week, we had another shooting

I hope the shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin doesn’t turn out to be the hate crime it looks like. And even more, I hope it isn’t a hate crime by somebody who thought that Sikhs are Muslims because they wear turbans. It’s bad enough to die for your religion, but it would be even worse to die because somebody mistook you for some other religion.

I’m a Unitarian Universalist, so of course this incident reminds me of the Knoxville shooting at a UU church.

Until then, everybody was talking about the Olympics

Watching this Olympics is frustrating for sports fans, because we’re not NBC’s target audience. They’re covering the Olympics as a phenomenon that just happens to include athletes, and the target audience watches because that’s what you do in August of a leap year.

So an hour of coverage contains maybe 10-15 minutes of actual competition. The rest consists of athletes’ backstories, retrospectives of past Olympics, interviews with people who aren’t competing, features on English culture, post-event bouncing and hugging, medal award ceremonies, and so on.

Yes, NBC, Gabby Douglas does have a great smile. I noticed that the other 12 times you mentioned it. But there’s a Russian girl who’s actually doing something right now. Could we maybe get a look at her?

When NBC does get around to the competitions, sportscasting is an afterthought. Announcers tell the story before the fact, and if the event turns out some other way it’s as if reality screwed up by failing to fulfill their predictions. (Sunday night, the other vaulters were covered as if they were just the opening act for McKayla Maroney. What in reality was an exciting upset by the Romanian was presented as a mystifying glitch.) A long race is just a visual backdrop for a chat about the American runner. (Uh, guys, some African is coming up strong on the outside. Can you tell us who he is? Are you watching?)  And I frequently find myself yelling at the TV: “Fascinating anecdote, but what’s the score? TELL ME THE SCORE!”

Oh well, why should they care what I think when the ratings are this good?

… and about Mitt Romney’s taxes

because he still refuses to release tax returns before 2010. This week’s episode centered on Harry Reid quoting an anonymous source who told him Romney “hasn’t paid taxes for ten years.” Romney countered that he “paid a lot of taxes” every year, and challenged Reid to “put up or shut up” by naming his source. But Romney will not put up anything to support his own claims.

This exchange continues the long tradition of August as silly season. Romney and Reid are arguing about what they could prove if they wanted to, but neither is actually proving anything.

Why are we talking about this? The tax-return issue only matters if it crystalizes a pattern. Two possibilities: First, a character pattern in which Romney is not just rich, but arrogant. He has decided what voters need to know about him, and that’s that.

Second, a pattern of vagueness and shiftiness. This non-disclosure reminds voters that Romney also hasn’t released the details of his tax plan, or his budget plan, or his health care plan, or anything else. Plus he still has at least two positions on culture-war issues like abortion and contraception.

Ezra Klein makes the second link:

If [Romney’s people] thought releasing more details would make the [tax] plan look better rather than worse, they would have released them rather than letting outside organizations fill in the blanks. It’s essentially the same theory as refusing to release the tax returns.

… and jobs.

The July jobs report was a dog that didn’t bark. After a dismal June (only 64,000 new jobs), July could have signaled the onset of a new recession. But instead the economy added 163,000 jobs. That’s not enough to keep the unemployment rate from ticking up to 8.3%, but this bumpy not-quite-recovery muddles along.

Naturally, the commentary focused on how the report affects the stock market (up), and Obama’s re-election chances (also up). But shouldn’t it be about the people who either got or didn’t get jobs?

Meanwhile, I wrote about insecure software

And you might also find this stuff interesting

Courtesy of George Takei (whose service on the Enterprise must give him an in with the space program), we get the first photos from the Curiosity probe that has landed on Mars:

I spent the week in Illinois, close enough to Missouri to hear the political ads in the last week before the primary. Senate candidate Sarah Steelman has gone all-in with Sarah Palin. You’d think Palin was the candidate. She has become the face and voice of the Steelman campaign.

The NYT’s “Your Money” column addressed an interesting question: Suppose you’ve come to the conclusion that the for-profit financial services industry is rigged against you, but you haven’t taken a vow of poverty and you still want to save and invest for your retirement. What do you do?

Your first move is obvious: bank at a credit union. For IRA and/or brokerage services, use

Vanguard, USAA or TIAA-CREF, all of which are member-owned or use profits to pay dividends to customers and lower their fees.

The column offers a number of investment ideas, from municipal bonds to direct investments in real estate properties or person-to-person loans to the “slow money” movement that loans money to co-ops, organic farms, and other socially conscious ventures.

Here’s a nice clear answer to the question: Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current U.S. Drought? Basically, climate change makes droughts more frequent and more extreme, even though you can’t say a particular drought couldn’t have happened otherwise.

I was going to use the metaphor of a weighted coin or a loaded die, but I discovered James Hansen did it long ago:

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability. … But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

No single roll proves the dice are loaded, but eventually …

it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

Disillusioned GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren has a new book out: The Party is Over. An excerpt, “Religion Destroyed My Party“, is up at Salon.

Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war. … The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs.

So long, Gore Vidal. My favorite Vidal novels are the ancient-history ones: Creation and Julian.

It’s easy to forget (and people under 50 probably never knew) just how famous Vidal was in his prime. Lily Tomlin could count on everyone recognizing his mispronounced name when she made him one of the first victims of her Ernestine the Operator character on Laugh In.

Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was a huge success. You’ve got to wonder if this means the Fox News model will spread to fast food and you’ll only be able to eat with people who share your politics. What if the CEO of Carl’s Jr. is thinking: “Wait a minute. I’m just as bigoted and reactionary as Dan Cathy. Why can’t I get an appreciation day?”

From a marketing POV, it makes sense: Fast-food chains don’t need a majority. If you could just get the most extreme 10% of the country to identify with you, you’d make billions.

I was looking for a striking image to end with. Is this one good enough? It’s a nighttime electrical storm over an erupting volcano in Iceland.

August 6, 2012 – 11:41 am Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

The Looming Software Catastrophe

A couple of stories this week don’t seem directly connected, but do suggest a theme: Wednesday, an automatic-trading program at Knight Capital went out of control and spewed “a torrent of faulty trades” onto the stock market for half an hour before any humans at the company figured out how to pull the plug. Knight’s losses are estimated at $440 million, which might kill the firm.

Thursday, a Republican filibuster scuttled the proposed cybersecurity bill, which

would have established optional standards for the computer systems that oversee the country’s critical infrastructure, like power grids, dams and transportation.

The Republican senators filibustered even though the bill had already been watered down to the point of being useless. A cybersecurity expert described the original bill as “all sticks and no carrots”. So when companies protested, a compromise made the sticks voluntary. We wound up with a bill that would allow masochistic corporations to submit to a voluntary binding.

Even that couldn’t pass. (The bill also had privacy and civil-liberty problems, but that’s not what brought it down.)

So here’s what we learned this week:

  • Bad software, even without any apparent malicious intent, can destroy a Wall Street firm in less time than it takes a banker to finish his second martini.
  • Software controls the power grid, oil and gas pipelines, the banking system, and a few other things that terrorists, hacktivists, hostile foreign powers, or joy-riding teen-agers might like to screw up.
  • The most toothless imaginable attempt to establish some security standards is too onerous for Congress’ corporate masters to allow.

What can you conclude from that? I think there’s a trend here that won’t stop until there’s a disaster big enough to scare the pants off everybody. And that means: There will be a disaster big enough to scare the pants off everybody.

The software culture. Our software development culture revolves around promising whiz-bang new features. If you can actually make them work most of the time, that’s even better. If they could fail without taking down the whole system, that would be nice — but hey, nobody’s perfect.

The problem is that security, reliability, and resiliency aren’t “features” that you can add to an already-existing product. They are systemic virtues that have to be designed in from the beginning and supported by a continual process of reporting, error containment, and a system-wide appreciation of rigor. Fundamentally, that’s bureaucratic and slows things down. We hate stuff like that.

That is, we hate it until some rogue application starts losing $15 million a minute. Then, slowing things down starts to sound like a good idea.

And that’s just a screw-up. What could somebody do if they really worked at it? That’s the so-called “digital Pearl Harbor” scenario, where an enemy doesn’t bother with bombs or bullets, it just takes down some key element of our infrastructure.

It could be that, or just a glitch, or some hacker’s joke that gets out of hand. But you can’t build vulnerable systems on top of other vulnerable systems forever and think that nothing is going to happen.

The political culture. Thursday’s vote made it clear that the government is not going to get out in front on this. Congress isn’t going to act until either business or the general public demands it. But how is that going to happen?

The business world doesn’t know how to think about stuff like this. Nobody knows how to estimate the odds of a software disaster, or predict the resulting damage, so there’s no box on a spreadsheet that says how much a firm is risking with its current software. Making a company’s software more secure would entail both a capital cost and an operating cost. What can a CEO compare that to in order to get a return-on-investment estimate? Without that estimate, software security just looks like a voluntary reduction of profit. What CEO is going to sign up for that?

But security could show up on a different part of the spreadsheet: not risk assessment, but marketing. Maybe the public would pay more for a secure product than an insecure one. Or, looking at it a different way, people might choose to locate their a bank or brokerage account at a firm that cared about software security.

But how is that going to work? You have no idea how the magic happens when you log into your bank account, and in the absence of a major catastrophe, you have no way to judge whether one system is more secure than another. You’re certainly not going to pay extra for a security claim you can’t judge.

And financial firms aren’t going to advertise that their risk is lower than somebody else’s, because they don’t want you to think online transactions are risky at all. They’re not going to start talking about security until after the public is scared.

A simple technique for predicting the future. Keep these two principles in mind:

  • A trend will continue until something stops it.
  • Trends that can’t go on forever won’t go on forever.

So if X is the only thing that could possibly stop a trend that can’t go on forever, sooner or later X will happen.

The trend that can’t go on forever is piling vulnerable systems on top of vulnerable systems. And I think I’ve just talked myself into believing that it won’t end until the public gets scared.

So X, in this case, is an event that scares the general public about software security. I can’t tell you what it’s going to be: a nationwide blackout, some unrecoverable loss of financial records, who knows? But it has to be big enough to break through our collective denial.

I also don’t when that’s going to happen. Tomorrow? Five years from now? But if that’s the only way for an unsustainable trend to end, it’s got to happen.

August 6, 2012 – 11:00 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

The Monday Morning Teaser

I’ve got to be honest: I’m still not entirely sure what’s going to be in today’s Sift. I spent this week in the Midwest managing the affairs of my 90-year-old father and considered canceling the Sift entirely until next week, but on my way home on Saturday I decided there were a few things worth posting. (BTW, those of you who follow my religious writings may feel like you know my Dad. He showed up as a major character here and here. Oh, and also in a political post here.)

This week everybody was mostly talking about same stuff as last week: the Olympics and Mitt Romney’s taxes. And then we got another major shooting, which might be a hate crime. We can’t be sure yet, because the shooter is dead and officials are reluctant to assign a motive prematurely.

The combination of a major automatic-trading malfunction Wednesday and a filibuster of the cybersecurity bill Thursday inspired me to write “The Looming Software Catastrophe”. When there’s a trend that only a major disaster can stop, you can pretty well predict that there will be a major disaster.

The Sift will be back at full strength next Monday.

August 6, 2012 – 8:01 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment