No both sides don't do it!

While Republicans think of ways they can legally steal Presidential elections and Congressional majorities using the gerrymander and rigging the electoral college, Democrats continue to play an entirely different kind of game. I'm not sure what game exactly, but it's different. Republicans are playing rugby and Democrats are playing badminton I guess. Now, badminton is a fun, honorable, gentlemen's pursuit. But ultimately, badminton players get the shit beat out of them by rugby players.

Take for example, South Carolina and Massachusetts. The Senator from South Carolina, a red state, steps down from office and the Republican governor of that red state appoints a Tea Party ideologue who will, given the incumbency and name recognition advantages of the office, cruise to re-election when his special term is up.

In Massachusetts, a blue state, the senior Senator is confirmed to become the next Secretary of State. The blue state governor of that very blue state does NOT, of course, replace that senator with a well known Congressman who plans to run in the next election for that vacated seat. Now, this Congressmen needs all the help he can get, because he will most likely be facing a well funded, well-liked Republican candidate who has demonstrated electoral success before. No, the Democratic governor of that very blue state instead requires that all appointments would, to be considered, need to refuse to run for the special election to fill that seat. And he makes a temporary appointment to a former chief-of-staff who agrees not to run.

Now, please, tell me again how "both sides do it". Please tell me that. God how I wish "both sides did it". Well, actually I wished we lived in this magical political bubble where all politicians acted in a consistently noble and honorable manner. Really, I do! It would be wonderful! But what did James Madison say? "If all men were angels, no government would be necessary" - Federalist #51. Yeah, men aren't angels. Nor should we expect them to behave as such, politicians or otherwise. So since we can't expect the Republicans to act like angels, can we at least expect Democrats to act-in-kind? I can't tell you how annoying it is to hear my fellow Democrats whine about Republican behavior. By God, we should be doing the same fucking things! I mean, the media will accuse us of the same dirty games anyway! It's always a "both-sides do it" story. So why shouldn't we be doing it? Why must we consistently put ourselves behind the 8-ball in terms of electoral and procedural effectiveness?

As Democrats, we like to say we put good governance above all else. That we are devoted to civil equality. To improving economic opportunity. To protecting the poor and the weak and the downtrodden. That we are vanguards of environmental justice. And so on. But a lot of the time, it's bullshit. In fact, we're more vested in the protection of our own facades of justice and nobility. It's why we Democrats elevate process over policies and, quite frankly, its pathetic. It's why Harry Reid brags about his bipartisan efforts to preserve the filibuster. Do you know what the filibuster has prevented through the years?  A healthcare plan with a public option. Cap and trade legislation on carbon dioxide emissions. If you were really interested in the stewardship of our environment, and the protection of our national health, you would take the electoral and procedural steps necessary to achieve those aims. But we're just not as vested in those aims as we claim to be. We'd rather lose nobly. And I say nuts to that.

I mean, Jesus Deval Patrick, do we have to go through this crap again? You couldn't appoint Ed Markey to the seat? Do you really think the appointment of a Democrat to a Democratic seat in a Democratic state is really so unseemly? Do you think Nikki Haley is worried about that shit? Do you think the next Washington Post headline will read, "Deval Patrick corrects 100 years of journalistic mischaracterization! Turns out both sides don't do it!"  Because I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. But, ya know, I'm sure you'll win an extra seven votes or so for acting so nobly this time. And if it costs us a Senate seat, so be it I suppose. Priorities, right?

Update: Gilgo Beach Investigation and Media Coverage Still Terrible

Another bang-up job by Newsday today -

NYPD: Lucius Crawford a possible person of interest in Gilgo Beach murders

If you read the story, you need to get about half-way through before they admit that this "person of interest" was in jail for a period overlapping some of the homicides. So yeah, if you ignore that esculpatory evidence, I guess he would be a "person of interest". 

I mean, I guess you could subscribe to the theory that there are multiple serial killers dumping bodies in the same spot over the same period, like the head of Homicide and the DA seem to believe, but most of us who live in the reality-based world realize that is most likely not the case. It's a shame that our entire Suffolk County law enforcement unit thinks otherwise:

Added [Suffolk County DA Tom] Spota: "Not one detective familiar with the facts of this case believes one person is responsible for these homicides."

If that statement about our homicide detectives is true (and I have no reason to think otherwise), it's not surprising why they haven't even come close to solving this case. Statements like that indicate that our DA is much more interested in being proven to be personally right about the case rather than actually solving the damn thing. And that is a very dangerous mind-set.

I guess Newsday has to cover this "update" since I do believe its important to keep the unsolved murder of ten or more people in the public consciousness. But they should have had the decency, or credibility, to admit the honest truth that there is no real new information there. But they are too lazy and/or greedy to actually do that.

UPDATE: Huh, no shit Sherlock...

Suffolk cops: Lucius Crawford doesn't appear to have 'any involvement' with Gilgo Beach murders

Better Financial Reporting Please

One policy area I'm admittedly not very well-versed in is financial industry regulation. When we first started to hear about the need for bank bailouts and TARP, I went along with the recommendations even though one of the few risks I did recognize was the moral hazard associated with bailing out the banks for their reckless behavior. I didn't really dive into the evidence for or against the need for the bank bailout because the people I trusted on economic matters generally agreed that it was a necessary evil - people like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, even Paul Krugman (who I hold above all others on economic matters). However, rightly or wrongly, people on both the left and the right really did punish candidates on both the left and the right for voting for TARP. In fact, while I think most political commentators are buffoons when they suggest that an alliance can be forged between the left and the Tea Party on financial issues, there does seem to be some convergence on the concept of "bank bailouts." That's why you'll sometimes see Paultards at Occupy Wall Street rallies, even though libertarian polices would substantially exacerbate the very economic and political inequalities the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are said to be fighting. While I'm personally satisfied to rely on the recommendations of my economic betters, this has not satisfied the opinions of the public at-large. A public that wildly reviles TARP. A public that believes that TARP was ineffectual (it was not) and cost the US a trillion dollars (it did not). A public that thinks, due to Republican lying and the media's deference to Republican lies, that the economic stimulus was a failure. It most certainly was not. There is a rundown of the economic literature on the stimulus here. The reason why people think the stimulus did not work, and that TARP did not work, and that Obama has failed the economy, is because the economy still blows. It is still choking the middle and lower classes to death. Unemployment is still sky high. These facts are indisputable, but I promise you this - it would be much, much worse, if these steps were not taken.  I cannot even imagine what kind of grotesque economic nightmare we would be living in if John McCain was elected President. Or if the Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress these last four years (let's remember that Republicans in Congress and in the Executive branch created this mess in the first place).
This is where the financial analysis, has, ultimately, failed us - not necessarily on the internet (where one can type in "Did the economic stimulus work?" and get hundreds of well-researched, and well-cited literature on the topic), but in the more traditional forms of mass media. Let's face it, analysts and experts on TV and in the newspapers do a very bad job at explaining alternate scenarios or counter-factuals. For example did anyone (the Bush administration, the Obama administration, finance industry experts, etc.), even attempt to explain why TARP was necessary? Like I said, I deferred to my experts of choice who told me these actions were necessary. But I still don't know why these actions were necessary. I mean seriously, who gives a shit if we let Lehman Brothers fail? Who cares about Bear Stearns? I'm still not sure how the success of failures of these mega-rich banks affect me. That's what I mean about better financial reporting please - we need better talking heads on TV and in USA Today. On the cable networks and in the pages of Newsweek. I mean, Paul Krugman (who does a wonderful job), can only be in so many place at once. We need the Brad DeLong's, and Michael Lewis', and Felix Salmon's out front and center on these topics. We need Matt Bai and David Leonhardt to explain these things to people. We need (shudder) Tim Geithner to explain these things. Because right now they are not doing it. And this contributes greatly to the bewildering public clamor for the creative destruction and economic austerity that underline the conservative agenda and assure the utter destruction of our middle and lower economic classes.

When information is not very useful

One thing that always annoys me about calorie counts in articles, websites, apps, etc. is that they never reflect the way people actually eat food! I'm going to pick on this Yahoo article as an example. I don't eat a lot of fast food, even though, I won't lie, it is convenient, it is cheap, and it is delicious. But this article on the best and worst fast food picks, while not meaningless, is still somewhat divorced from how people actually eat food. Every time you see calories or fat counts in food like this (or any food really), it always assumes the person eats more economically and efficiently than real people eat. These articles always give dumb examples like this:

Deluxe Breakfast, with a large biscuit and no syrup or margarine (1,150 calories, 60 grams of fat) 


Well who the fuck is ordering the deluxe breakfast with no syrup and no margarine? Or ketchup? Nobody! Why even give those calorie counts? Why do they give calorie counts for burgers without ketchup? Salads without dressings? Sandwiches with the healthiest breads instead of the more popular breads.  If you want your intended audience to lose weight (as these types of articles are presumed to do), they should err on the high side of calorie counts. They should assume that customers are drowning their McDonald's french fries in ketchup or BBQ sauce, or Honey Mustard sauce. I mean, they give calorie counts on mozzarella sticks without the sauce - what's the point? Who eats mozzarella sticks like that?  If we really want people to lose weight, we should overestimate their calorie counts and let the customer adjust their intakes in other meals.  Otherwise, people who are attempting to diet presume their are ingesting a lot less calories than they really are.  Many times I think these articles are actually designed to simply make people feel better about their own eating choices. In that regard they succeed, but they do a very poor job of actually explaining to the public why they can't seem to lose any weight.

This is what passes for government investigation these days

Buried on Page 20 of the Sunday NY Times was the resolution of the inquiry into the Pentagon's use of high-profile military analysts to fuel the public relations battle for war in Iraq and Afghanistan. For those of you unfamiliar, from 2002 to 2008 the Pentagon and military contractors pretty much solicited former military personnel to advocate for increased military engagement, warfare, and expenditures in the Middle East on networks like NBC, CNN, and Fox. What made this practice problematic was not the lobbying per se. The government is entitled to sell their warmongering (it's called propaganda my friends, and while pernicious, it's not illegal). What made this particularly egregious was that these analysts were paid by the networks themselves and were supposed-to-be "neutral" military analysts. Clearly "neutrality" needs to be called into question when defense contractors are specifically paying "military analysts" on the major news networks.

This caused a minor uproar (and caused a subsequent investigations), because Democrats proved to be marginally interested in investigating Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld falsities at the time (even aloof Democrats can smell blood in the political waters). Once Obama was elected and we all agreed that "what was past was past," (well we didn't agree but our political bettors did), investigations like these (and Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretapping, political witchunts in the DA's office, etc.) were squashed. I mean, it just seemed wiser for the executive branch to prosecute government whistleblowers and deport illegal immigrants, both of which we are doing at the highest rate in US history right now.

Unsurprisingly, the investigation concluded that no legal or ethical breaches were made by the Bush Administration in their military version of "pay-to-play." Are you as surprised as I am? Anyway, what struck me as funny in the article, besides the fact that the Pentagon was tasked with investigating themselves, (Gee, I can't believe they found no wrongdoing!), was this part of the article, my emphasis in bold:

The inspector general’s office looked into the issue of whether military analysts with ties to defense contractors used their access to senior Defense Department officials to advance their business interests.

The report found that at least 43 of the military analysts were affiliated with defense contractors. The inspector general’s office said it asked 35 of these analysts whether their participation in the program benefited their business interests. Almost all said no. Based on these answers, the report said, investigators were unable to identify any analysts who “profited financially” from their participation in the program.

You see? They asked them if they profited financially from these connections. And they said no! Well, no reason to investigate further then! I'm satisfied. I mean, we could look at financial records and such but I don't see any reason for that. Nothing to see here!

This man is a lot smarter than me...

I hope I don't do this too often, but I'm going to excerpt a long portion of Glenn Greenwald's post below:

In The New Yorker, George Packer, who vocally supported the attack on Iraq but criticized it when it starting failing, writes about Christopher Hitchens​, who never deviated from full-throated support. Most of what Packer writes is, as one would expect, little more than the now-trite reminiscing about Hitchens we’ve heard from his thousands of media friends which Neal Pollack parodied so brilliantly here, but Packer’s concluding paragraph struck me as something worth highlighting:

Iraq led Hitchens to some of his worst indulgences—the propaganda trip to Iraq in Wolfowitz’s entourage, the pose of Byronic heroism. But perhaps the war and the enemies it made him helped give Hitchens the courage of his last years and months—the atheist in the foxhole. Hitchens was one of the very few people who could slash and burn you in print, then meet for drinks and talk in the true warmth of friendship, discussing a writer we both admired, garrulous to the very last. It was a sign of his essential decency that he didn’t make it personal.

Is it really “a sign of decency” to refuse to view any political ideas as not merely wrong in some abstract intellectual sense, but as a reflection of the person’s character? Obviously, there are many political disagreements — most — which can and should be conducted in perfectly good faith without the need for personal animus. Conversely, though, aren’t there some political views so repellent and sociopathic that “a sign of essential decency” is to make it personal, rather than refusing to do so? This line of thought strikes me as anything but essentially decent:

Sure, he was and remained a fervent, unrepentant public cheerleader for an aggressive, baseless attack on another country that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people and displaced millions more, and sure, he was very eager to fuel an Endless War that resulted in the deaths of countless innocent men, women and children that he himself never fought in, but I’m not going to hold any of that against him. I’ll argue with him as part of entertaining, invigorating political debate, but then will be happy to go out for drinks with him — he’s a really fun guy — and will proudly call him my friend.

In what sense does “decency” compel — or even permit — that line of thought? Packer, as he usually does, is simply giving voice to the standard mindset of Washington’s political and media class. As Charles Davis put it to me by email a couple of days ago when discussing David Corn’s expressed admiration for Hitchens — the irony that the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones, of all places, waxed so effusive about one of the nation’s leading war zealots:

That’s Washington. Issues of war and peace — life and death — are just something you argue about from 9 to 5, and only when the cameras are on. Disagreeing on the wisdom of invading and occupying other nations is like disagreeing on whether the minimum wage should be $9.50 or $9.25: nothing serious enough to end a relationship over (see: Lake, Eli). And what’s a few hundred thousand dead brown people between friends?

The bottomless willingness of political and media elites to forgive each other of their sins, insulate personal relationships from everything else, and subordinate all other considerations to loyalty to their shared membership in those circles is not “a sign of essential decency.” It’s one of the leading causes of Washington’s rot.

Surprise, surprise, I think Greenwald gets this right. One reason I try to avoid political discussions (at least among my non-CU brethren), is that I have a very difficult time divorcing their political beliefs from their personalities. If you are the type of person who finds the permanent war-state to be necessary and continuous good, well then, you sir, are a bad person. If you can't support unemployment benefits because somewhere in the country a black person isn't "trying hard enough to find a job," well then you, ma'am, are a bad person. It's very difficult for me to pretend otherwise. The only way I can do so is if we avoid political discussions entirely. Now, granted, Greenwald would call me a coward because I'm still willing to have drinks with warmongers at cocktail hour (substituting the "hear-no-evil" approach for the informed consent approach), but at least it is tough for me to reconcile these differences. But unfortunately, I just don't have enough friends to act differently. So I admit my own dereliction of duty to cause. What's pathetic though is that, in the media, this reconciliation is actually celebrated, rather than disavowed, as a source of courage.  Thankfully, even I would never have enough "courage" to share Jaeger Bombs with Rick Perry, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin, or other chaotic evil individuals