November 2009 Archives

The Language Log's Geoffrey K. Pullum notes a grammar grouch who writes to the Economist to complain about a columnist beginning sentences with conjunctions.

SIR -- And I thought that The Economist followed its own "Style Guide". But Lexington set a new record for the number of sentences starting with conjunctions (November 7th). But only 12. And I suppose some people appreciate such puerile prose. But not I.
MARC RIESE
Berne, Switzerland

At some level, I have to respect the style of this objection. Even if it is not clear to Pullum that The Economist's style actually bans such usage.

I admit it is something I try to avoid. Pullum discusses whether we avoid this for good grammar reasons (unlikely) or because of grade-school zero-tolerance grammar conditioning.

From the Big Picture, here's an interactive chart from the New York Times showing what percentage of the population in each of the nation's counties are receiving food stamps. The program now feeds 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children across the country.

Michael Panzner at the Big Picture links to PNC Financial Services' annual Christmas Price Index, which computes how much the items in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" would cost each year.

Since the PNC index began in 1984, interestingly enough, the price of the items in the carol have risen only 69 percent, much less than the doubling in the headline consumer price index over that time. (And much less than the real inflation rate, which the headline CPI measures mask.)

So, you may want to head out for the partridge and the pear tree, etc.

While we are often told by our political leaders that it is bad form to look back, one of the great questions of the past decade is why and how Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001. Thankfully not everyone has refused to review the situation. As the New York Times' Scott Shane writes about a new Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Tora Bora:

"Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat," the committee's report concludes. "But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide."

The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military's Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden's escape into Pakistan are still being felt.

The report blames the lapse for "laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan."

This was one of the biggest errors of the Bush Administration's War on Terrorism. Why are we not supposed to hear from General Tommy Franks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld, and other leading Bush Administration officials about why they refused to send enough troops to ensure bin Laden's capture?

These are questions that should not be lost to the mists of time or our refusal to hold those in power to accountable for their mistakes.

That's what James Fallows has been arguing the past few days at his Atlantic blog. Fallows' analysis that the trip was not a failure appears to grow more persuasive with each passing day's new headlines.

FiveThirtyEight.com's Tom Schaller analyzes the impact unemployment could have on President Obama's reelection prospects.

Schaller uses as his starting point great graphical presentations of state-by-state unemployment since 2001 published by the University of Wisconsin's Charles Franklin. Schaller points to some states to which the president may want to pay special attention over the next couple of weeks.

The president and his team now appear to realize they need to prioritize jobs. I fear it may be too late.

Over at the Campaign for America's Future blog, Dave Johnson links to a good illustration of U.S. wealth concentration on the L-Curve web site.

Just how concentrated is the wealth and income? The L-Curve website graphically illustrates the disparity. Here's how it works.

Picture a football field. Each of the 100 yards is 1% of the population. At any point on the field you pile a stack of $100 bills to represent the income that a family in that percentile makes. So the median family income would be on the 50-yard line.

According to the site (old data), in 2005 the median family was approx. $40,000, and the stack of $100 bills would be about 1.6 inches high.

The family on the 95-yard line makes about $100K, a stack about 4 inches high.

99-yard line, $300K, about a foot high.

One foot line, top 1/3 of one percent, $1 million, 40 inches.

Now the slope of the graph starts to rise.

$1 billion is a stack 1 kilometer high. (Median family income was 1.6 inches.)

And then you start to get to the really rich. $10 billion is a stack the height of Mt. Everest.
The last few on the field have income representing a stack 15 kilometers high.

Two points:

1) This is old data. The concentration is greater now. The top incomes might not be as high this year.

2) The concentration of wealth is even greater than the concentration of income.

One of the major problems I've found when talking about government budgets is the inability most people have to visualize the impact of large numbers. When you look at the chart, and see the visual impact of the L-Curve, the dramatic disparity in income distribution is striking.

The weekly Daily Kos/Research 2000 tracking poll has a few results that should worry every Democrat less than a year from the mid-term elections.

QUESTION: In the 2010 Congressional elections will you definitely vote, probably vote, not likely vote, or definitely will not vote?

The results were, to put it mildly, shocking:

Voter Intensity: Definitely + Probably Voting/Not Likely + Not Voting

Republican Voters: 81/14
Independent Voters: 65/23
DEMOCRATIC VOTERS: 56/40

We knew Republican voters were fired up. But look at those Democratic results: only 56 percent say they are definitely or probably voting in 2010, and 40 percent say they are not likely or definitely not voting.

Now, there is still a year to go, so there is still time to change some minds. But the President Obama, his administration, and Congressional Democratic leaders may want to spend as much time visibly trying to reignite Democratic voters' interest as they are trying to get Senator Olympia Snowe's (R-Maine) vote.

Our friends the British have begun an investigation this week into their involvement into the Iraq War, one to which we should pay more close attention.

Glenn Greenwald, for example, reviews testimony yesterday that should remind us of how important the anthrax attacks which followed the September 11, 2001 attacks were to creating the climate of fear in the United States that fed into the Iraq invasion and so many other horrible policies. Yes, those same anthrax attacks so quickly deleted from our collective memory.

Yesterday, the former U.K. Ambassador to the U.S., Sir Christopher Meyer, testified as to the importance of the anthrax attacks, as Greenwald summarizes:

Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .

On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in "no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation" . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .

But the anthrax scare had "steamed up" policy makers in Bush's administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax. (emphasis by Greenwald)

As Greenwald then reminds us, the anthrax attacks remain "unresolved and uninvestigated." How the hell is that acceptable given how important they were? He reviews, with links, all of the sources that have serious questions for about the FBI's conclusion to this case.

I simply do not understand how we have left the anthrax attacks unresolved and wiped from our collective memory. They directly impacted more people than the September 11 attacks. They created more fear. (To this day, how many of us get training on the proper way to open mail?)

Some things deserve more of our attention. That's why I encourage you to go read Greenwald's post and restart your memory by clicking on his post's links.

TPMMuckraker's Justin Elliott updates the status of an investigation involving Democratic members of the Appropriations Committee, defense contractors, and the PMA Group, a lobbying group raided by the FBI earlier this year.

A federal criminal investigation has touched two House Dems, and another three, along with two Republicans, are under scrutiny by a pair of congressional ethics panels in matters related to the defunct lobbying firm, PMA Group.

The investigation appears to have two focal points, according to reports: that PMA may have funneled sham donations to members of Congress through so-called "straw donors" who would be reimbursed, and that there may have been a quid pro quo, exchanging defense earmarks for campaign donations.

Of all the factors that could cause the Democrats to lose major seats in 2010, I admit this one has me quite worried. Catching up with Elliott's post is well worth your time.

Digby saves me the trouble of finding former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's quote from the Rachel Maddow Show this week about whether we should fear threats from Wall Street that regulating compensation will result in people leaving their jobs. Spitzer said:

There's an old saying, I think it was De Gaulle. 'The graveyards are filled with indispensable men.' The AIG folks who are saying they're indispensable - test them. I think it's time to call their bluff. Say to them, 'you want to leave? Go away. We will replace you at one third of the pay.' The entire structure of Wall Street pay is out of control.

Amen.

These people would have no bonuses at all without the bailout of the American taxpayer. Now, in gratitude, they want to hold us hostage?

As Digby notes, in a country of 300 million people we can find others to hold down these positions. It's time to put an end to this reckless greed. If Wall Streeters don't like it, they can go. And they should not wait for the door to hit them on their behinds as they leave.

Ezra Klein finds a US News analysis that measures just how much greater the use of the filibuster is today. It's gone, according to this research by UCLA Professor Barbara Sinclair, from impacting eight percent of major legislation in the 1960s to over 70 percent today.

As Klein notes:

I can't emphasize this enough: Things are not as they have always been. The filibuster has transformed, and the Senate has followed suit, and it all happened accidentally, not with anyone debating the consequences and implications of adding a supermajority requirement to the American legislative process.

Now would be a good time to start considering whether we want this anti-democratic blight on our Republic to continue.

Bruce Bartlett has written another must-read column in Forbes about House Appropriations Committee Chair David Obey (D-Wisc.)'s demand that any expansion of the war in Afghanistan be paid through a tax increase and not by adding to the national debt.

Bartlett reminds us that the Bush Administration became the first in U.S. history not to ask its citizens to sacrifice to aid in a war effort. Instead, we were told to go shopping and to enjoy tax cuts that, like the wars, were funded through large increases in the national debt.

The same people who cheered on these policies have returned the balanced budget religion now that a Democrat is in the White House. Yes, it only matters when a Democrat is president. How convenient.

Wars that cannot be supported through the sacrifice of a large proportion of the American people, and not just the few families of people who volunteer for our armed forced, should not be fought. As Bartlett writes:

"If Americans aren't willing to follow John F. Kennedy and "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" to fight a war, then we shouldn't be fighting it."

Indeed. And it is well past time for the Republican supporters of these wars to be called out on their budget deficit hypocrisy. If these wars must be fought, we should pay for them -- not future generations.

Let's see them vote on this and watch these fiscal responsibility converts conveniently lose their newly found religion.

Ezra Klein has posted a memo sent to President Johnson in 1964, one which highlights just how much the use of the filibuster has changed since then.

As Klein notes, the author of the memo to LBJ could not write today that the then-controversial Medicare legislation should pass 55-45--because now the filibuster would be used to stop the vote from ever happening. As Klein explains:

The filibuster of yesteryear, in other words, was not a supermajority requirement. It was closer to a tantrum. That's not to say it was never used to prevent a vote: Southerners did exactly that to block the Civil Rights Act, and Johnson was forced to find 67 votes to break their effort. But such measures were left for extraordinary moments, not built into the everyday workings of the body. The use of the filibuster has changed, and with it, so too has the Senate. If that transformation is a good thing, then the practice's supporters can make their argument. But the radicals aren't the ones who want to undo stealth rewriting of the legislative process. It's those who want to ignore it.

There are enough checks-and-balances (including the small-state bias of the Senate) in our government system now. Our Republic does not need this supermajority requirement as a matter of routine business.

It is time for the filibuster to be eliminated.

Mark Schmitt points with justification at former Senator Robert Dole and the ideological realignment of our two major political parties..

And, yes, I still think it is well past time for us to eliminate the filibuster--even if its elimination has to be set at some future date (perhaps six years from now) so no one knows for sure who will have the majority then.

Media Matters catches Obama appointee and former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino rewriting history as she tells Sean Hannity.

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term.

Could someone tell her that September 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks that followed actually happened after President George W. Bush took office?

Dear Mr. President: why was it you appointed Perino to the Broadcasting Board of Governors again? Really, there were no other Republicans in the nation who were qualified for the job?

As Professor Brad DeLong explains in his blog post headline: "The People Who Sell Their Forecasts to Paying Clients Believe the Stimulus Is Working."

But what would these liberal communist socialist sympathizers know?

I agree the stimulus package is helping the economy. But it was not enough -- and more of it should have been used on infrastructure and other projects to create jobs.

The Washington Note's Steve Clemons estimates the financial cost of an Afghanistan surge.

Clemons notes his $105 billion price tag (which seems conservative to me) is higher than the annual cost of the health care reform plan and nearly 10 times higher than Afghanistan's nominal gross domestic product.

Many self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives would be happy to let this surge be paid for by increasing the national debt (something they would never demand for health care or infrastructure improvements).

At least some leaders, like House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, may force these self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives to face and debate their hypocrisy when it comes to our wars.

Arianna Huffington and James K. Galbraith are pessimistic about the Obama Administration's ability to handle the growing unemployment crisis.

Huffington wonders if unemployment will be President Obama's Katrina and Galbraith notes the structural barriers to enacting policies necessary to improve employment in the short term.

I am amazed that so many leading Democratic politicians continue to act and think as if they will not be blamed for unemployment over 10 percent -- and more realistic measures reaching 17.5 percent in October.

The biggest failure of the Obama Administration so far has been its reliance on advisors who insist on choosing Wall Street's desires over Main Street's needs.

In the end, many people vote their jobs. I fail to understand how this can be surprising given how many people rely on jobs for the health care -- or are one missed paycheck away from economic disaster.

A Democratic Party that cares more about protecting the bonus pools of Wall Street giants over the job situation of the average American family is destined to fail.

Former Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub has written a profile of the Bay Area Council's Jim Wunderman, who is one of the leaders of efforts to convene a Constitutional Convention to deal with our dysfunctional government structure.

The profile includes quotes from my local State Senator, Mark DeSaulnier, one of the reform leaders in the State Legislature.

If you are watching the California Constitutional Convention efforts, it is worth your time to learn more about one of the people who has kept the conversation going.

Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur analyzes seriously depressing data about the newspaper industry recently released by the Newspaper Association of America. As Mutter explains:

With three months to go in the worst year ever for newspapers, the drop in sales in the first three quarters of 2009 is roughly equal to the combined revenues for the last 12 months of Gannett and McClatchy Co. In other words, it's as though two of the largest publicly owned publishers in the land just fell off the face of the earth.

Ouch.

Our Republic needs a strong group of reporters gathering news and providing oversight over our government and institutions. Whether or not newspapers survive, we need to figure out how the reporting and editing can survive this carnage.

Charles Pierce is right to be outraged after seeing President Obama appoint former Bush 43 Press Secretary Dana Perino to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. As Pierce writes over on Altercation:

I know it doesn't matter much in the great scheme of things, but it is wholly indicative of the ongoing frustration I have with President Civility and his Folding Commandos. Ms. Perino's checkered history as a hired obsfuscator has been well-documented in and around the web. (She compared the administration's criticism of Mr. Murdoch's Toy News Network to something "dictators" would do and this from a woman who didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.) The president is doing Mitch McConnell a favor here. (How about doing, say, Bernie Sanders a favor?) What I don't understand is why.

Why indeed. Could the White House really not find a single Republican qualified to serve who hadn't compared the president to a dictator recently?

Pierce is just warming up in the excerpt I quote above. As he notes later, Obama's attempts to reach out will not work. They cannot work. The Republican Party is not out to negotiate with him, its elected leaders and leading interest groups are out to destroy him.

I fail to understand why the Obama administration is so willing to help with that effort.

Bruce Bartlett posts a must-read column at Capital Gains and Games targeting all of those Republicans who today oppose health care reform but in 2003 voted for the Medicare prescription drug benefit as unbelievable deficit hypocrites. As Bartlett explains:

Just to be clear, the Medicare drug benefit was a pure giveaway with a gross cost greater than either the House or Senate health reform bills how being considered. Together the new bills would cost roughly $900 billion over the next 10 years, while Medicare Part D will cost $1 trillion.

Moreover, there is a critical distinction--the drug benefit had no dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers; 100% of the cost simply added to the federal budget deficit, whereas the health reform measures now being debated will be paid for with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, adding nothing to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (See here for the Senate bill estimate and here for the House bill.)

Maybe Franks isn't the worst hypocrite I've ever come across in Washington, but he's got to be in the top 10 because he apparently thinks the unfunded drug benefit, which added $15.5 trillion (in present value terms) to our nation's indebtedness, according to Medicare's trustees, was worth sacrificing his integrity to enact into law. But legislation expanding health coverage to the uninsured--which is deficit-neutral--somehow or other adds an unacceptable debt burden to future generations. We truly live in a world only George Orwell could comprehend when our elected representatives so easily conflate one with the other.

Where were all the tea partiers when the Republicans were holding open votes for three hours to pass the deficit-financed Medicare prescription drug benefit? Where were they when Republicans took large projected surpluses and turned them into debt (and a near depression) during the Bush Administration?

I'm sorry, but the Republican Party long ago lost any right to discuss fiscal responsibility. As Bartlett notes, real conservative objections to the expansion of government influence in health care exist: but cries of fiscal recklessness are not among them.

You can watch the unemployment crisis sweep across the nation by viewing an animated image tracking the unemployment rate by county from January 2007 to the present.

(Hat tip: The Big Picture)

At some point, shouldn't repeated lying disqualify someone from being Mr. Morality in Politics (tm)? Brian Beutler writes at Talking Points Memo:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) raised hackles among liberals earlier this week when he claimed that the public option wasn't a part of the 2008 presidential campaign. He repeated that claim to reporters tonight, though acknowledged, when pressed, that then-candidate Barack Obama did in fact include a public option in his campaign health care proposal.

On the Blockbuster Democracy Blog, Joe Mathews notes that the right-wing recall effort against Assemblyman Anthony Adams (R) failed because more than half of the signatures submitted in San Bernardino County were invalid.

Adams was targeted for recall because of his sanity during last February's state budget debates, when he agreed to vote for temporary tax increases. It is part of a long-standing effort among conservative activists to destroy the political career of any Republican who dares consider voting for taxes as part of a balanced budget solution.

For many reasons, I am glad this radical recall effort failed. Recalls should not be used to settle political scores. We have elections every two years in the State Assembly, which is frequent enough.

Earlier this week Matthew Yglesias linked to this outstanding illustration of the Eisenhower Interstate System represented in a format similar to the London Underground map.

The Sacramento Bee's comment section rarely fails to provide some "popular" comment that should be mocked, and not celebrated, for its fact-free pronouncements.

Take, for example, this popular comment attached to a story about Attorney General Jerry Brown issuing an opinion stating the California Citizens Compensation Commission can cut the salaries of the state's constitutional officers and legislators in the middle of their terms.

Look at those last two sentences. It assumes that our legislators are rich and it assumes that our legislators would object to being added to our same retirement system as the state workers.

Well, vsormano, I can say that virtually all of California's state legislators would love to have the same state retirement system as state workers. Because California legislators are banned, by a proposition passed by the voters, from having any retirement besides employer payroll taxes paid to Social Security.

Proposition 140, passed by California voters in 1990, is the voter-initiated Constitutional Amendment that created our state's draconian term limits regime. But, as with many propositions, it included other elements: in this case, it also banned our state legislators from receiving any retirement benefits besides Social Security.

Not that people seem to remember.

This is not an insignificant point. Vsormano is trying to attack our legislators. Instead, vsormano is showing just how little he or she knows about how the California government actually operates. Perhaps it is comforting not to acknowledge the facts of our government. But it does nothing to make it work better.

By the way, in a state the requires two-thirds votes for so many things, isn't it interesting that the term limits regime that has been such a contributing factor in our dysfunctional government was created by a vote with just 52.17 percent in favor.

Do Californians realize that some senior members of the Governor's finance team were examining whether the state could become a federal territory as a reaction to the ongoing fiscal crisis? David Dayen found what he justifiably calls the "quote of the year" in a recent Wall Street Journal story about the fiscal problems facing the states:

"I looked as hard as I could at how states could declare bankruptcy," said Michael Genest, director of the California Department of Finance who is stepping down at the end of the year. "I literally looked at the federal constitution to see if there was a way for states to return to territory status."

But, but, I thought the Governor could solve all of our fiscal problems by blowing up the boxes and fighting the fraud, waste, and abuse through the use of his all-powerful blue pencil line-item veto pen?

The next time the Governor or one of his supporters argue that fraud, waste, and abuse or overspending the cause of our fiscal crisis, perhaps we could ask why the governor's team is looking at ending our statehood when he has had five years of state budgets he could blue-pencil without real fear the state legislature would override him.

Bruce Schneier has an outstanding post arguing for the need to move beyond security theater and engage our rational minds around the terrorism threat and what should be done to prevent it.

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11 -- their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

This entire post is worth reading. And we need more discussion on these points.

We've accepted many things out of fear since 9/11/01. But we rarely question whether the measures we've accepted actually make us safer.