PQuincy's Blog

There goes the AP, blindly followed by the NYT, again

2009-10-21T18:31:46Z

The AP tells us about moves to change the current anti-trust 'exemption' for insurance companies. They're probably right that this move is going forward now because of AHIP's turn to undermine health care finance reform by issuing and trumpeting a wildly misleading assessment of the effect that reform would have on premiums -- so misleading that the accounting firm that prepared it issued a public notice that they had been commissioned to assess only aspects of the bill that might increase premiums, but to ignore features that might decrease premiums.

How the AP (followed blindly by the NT Times), decribe this?

"The events occurred less than a week after the insurers' trade association issued a report saying a measure that cleared the Senate Finance Committee would produce sharp increases in premiums for millions who currently have insurance. Democrats and the White House reacted angrily, attacking the study as flawed and politically motivated."

I've heard that people disagree about whether the earth is round, too.

It's classic he-said/she-said ventriloquism. There's nothing explicitily false about the AP's statement, but it's presented in such a way to dismiss critiques of the AHIP study -- which was transparently flawed, as noted above, and which was most obviously political. By saying that Democrats "reacted angrily", the AP substitutes the attribution of emotions to the reporting of facts.

Memo to NYT headline writers

2009-09-24T08:48:42Z

When your reporters write a story about how the status of Medicare Advantage plans--privately operated Medicare that uses large extra subsidies, running about 30% over regular Medicare--whose operators are fiercely defending their plump extra profits by threatening seniors with benefit cuts, think twice about what you headline the story.

Perhaps: "Nelson supports insurance company efforts to defend subsidies"?
Or: "Nelson plays along with insurance industry scare tactics"?

But please: who in Heavens' name came up with "Senator Tries to Allay Fears on Health Overhaul"

It's true that Advantage plans offer meager extra benefits, dangled before beneficiaries while most of the extra covers insurance company operating costs and profits. And it's certainly true that the insurance companies have used those profits not just to lobby Nelson and other directly with abundant campaign contributions, but also to whip up fear among their clients. But eliminating Advantage would not cut Medicare benefits a bit: it would rather remove an inefficient middleman.

Comment on NYT Cheney story (censored?)

2009-08-31T15:09:56Z

Being in Europe, I was the first person, I think, to comment on the NYTimes story on Cheney's latest statements. (Apparently, though, the Times did not post the comment; it appears when I'm logged in, but with no number or 'recommend' field, and it's not there when I view the comments page without being logged in).

Here's what I wrote:

"Cheney celebrates torture; sun also rises in East again." Why is this news?

The former vice president spent much of his term urging brutality in various forms, and has vocally insisted that we should immediately lower ourselves to the tactics of the worst regimes in history. There is nothing new in his latest statements, just repetition of morally repugnant claims and political posturing.

I appreciate for an article that discusses Senator Feinstein's views, the position of Senator McCain (who has personal experience with torture), and others. These are active legislators who all point out how difficult it is to deal with the sludge the Bush-Cheney administration left the country.

Mr. Cheney's outbursts, in contrast, are not new, and are not news. Stop offering such a repugnant figure the soapbox of the front page of the New York Times!

Ponnuru welcomes the Southern Democrats

2009-04-28T20:07:11Z

Ramesh Ponnuru comments in the New York Times:

Republicans are a more homogeneously conservative party today, but so too are Democrats a more homogeneously liberal party. Each party's trend has reinforced the other. As liberal Republicans joined the Democrats, conservative Democrats, feeling less at home, joined the Republican Party, making it more conservative

Indeed, he's right. The Southern Democrats, dead set against civil rights for African Americans, flocked to the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s. Now we see that Ponnuru sees this as an equal exchange, making the Republican party "more homogeneously conservative."

I'm glad it's clear, then, what "conservative" actually means in American politics!

NYTimes still providing cover: "arcane" "obscure" reconciliation rules

2009-04-24T18:26:37Z

Carl Hulse at the New York Times just posted a report on the Democratic leadership's plan to make some use of the budget reconciliation rules in the process of passing health care reform bills.

Hulse's description of reconciliation includes the following phrases:

"the use of an obscure procedure known as a reconciliation," and "the arcane maneuver"

Fromn Hulse's description, you'd never know that reconciliation was used to pass " tax cuts, oil drilling, trade authority, and much else" during the Bush years (quoting Ezra Klein at http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fifty_vote_senate).

Rather, the term "obscure procedure known as reconciliation" has become a bit of Washington-village cliche, preset and ready for journalists to import into every article that mentions the term. The very fact that there's a cliched form built on the term suggests that it's neither obscure or arcane, any more than the filibuster or the unanimous consent agreement is. Rather, reconciliation is a piece of Congressional rules that has been used regularly at least since the 1980s.

I don't know whether putting some or all of health care reform into budget bills and passing them under reconciliation rules is a legal or political good idea: I just know that there's nothing obscure or arcane about the possibility, and labeling it so is just unthinking cover for particular views.

As for Hulse's remark that employmen of reconciliation would " likely to touch off a nasty partisan fight with Republicans": Well, what do you call the current situation, where Republican legislators continually call the President a socialist, hold up lots of nominations on flimsy grounds, and filibuster 'most everything that comes up in the Senate? Would Hulse describe the current legislative atmosphere as "healthy bipartisan debate," perhaps? As "cooperation in moving the nation's agenda"? Has Hulse, a New York Times reporter, been paying any attention at all to the political discourse and actions of the minority party over the last month?

Moral Bankruptcy at the New York Times

2009-04-23T13:07:58Z

The moral bankruptcy of the NY Times and its 'news analyst' Scott Shane is on full display today. A front page (web) headline and blurb read:

At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?
By SCOTT SHANE

The entire article sustains the premise that the "core" of the debate over the United States' official deployment of torture during the Bush administration was "what if anything was gained" by torturing various detainees held by the CIA and US military interrogators.

The comments are quickly accumulating, and a substantial number of them attack the premise of Mr. Shane's absurd article. Again and again, readers point out that the debate over the Bush administration's torture policies is, at it's core, about the rule of law (torture is illegal by US law and international law and treaties that the US has subscribed), and about morals (torture is evil.)

Shane even makes the astonishing assertion that " the moral balancing would be far trickier if the C.I.A. methods were demonstrated to have been crucial in disrupting major plots."

No, Mr. Shane, the moral balancing would not be trickier.

The US media's fondness for 'reporting the controversy' -- "Is the earth round? Opinions differ" -- reaches its apotheosis in this article.

There is little debate among those familiar with the historical record that torture is never an effective way of eliciting information. It did not work when the Inquisition tortured heretics and Jews. It did not work when judges tortured witches. It did not work when the Nazis tortured Communists and liberals, nor when Stalin's thugs tortured anybody. Torture does not produce reliable information.

Yet a headline and the body of an entire "news analysis" article in our leading national newspaper treats this question as open while entirely ignoring the "core" issue that has indeed driven the debate over the Bush administration's policy: is torture depraved and illegal, or should states have the power to torture when they feel threatened, as Dick Cheney suggests.

Right wing ignoring reality (LA Times Prop 13 issue)

2009-03-01T20:19:22Z

The LA Times has an article by Evan Halpern, today, that claims that the "[s]tate's middle class [is] getting less for its tax dollars." Halpern points out that California once had great roads, a widely-accessible and inexpensive world class university system, and good schools. Alas, it now seems that the state no longer offers high-quality services; quoting a (conservative) expert, Halpern notes that you can't tell the difference between being in California and Texas, any more.

Halpern also identifies new kinds of spending that (he implies) explain the change: he mentions briefly the rising cost of long incarcerations, but mostly focuses on the "tattered" safety net for poorer Californians, which includes health care costs.

But nowhere....nowhere!...does he mention Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and also limited their rate of increase as long as ownership did not change. This is a huge oversight, one so large that it can scarcely be seen as accidental. It's the elephant in state fiscal planning, because the state now pays out of general revenue for all sorts of things that municipalities and counties used to pay for out of property taxes. California has also slipped from being an (admittedly) high-tax burden state in 1970 to the middle of the pack now: state taxes are relatively high on sales and income, but property taxes are quite low, putting the state around 17th in overall tax burden. But none of this is so much as hinted at in Halpern's dishonest analysis.

Here's the letter I sent him: we'll see if he, the LA Times, or the blogsphere picks up one more example of journalistic disingenousness. (See also the Calitics blog for more discussion).

Dear Mr. Halpern,

Your commentary in today's LA Times refers to some useful issues, such as the changing costs of some state services, or to the rapidly rising cost of incarceration in the state budget.

However, any discussion of state finances without mentioning Prop. 13 is, in my estimation, simply dishonest. Californians are not just "getting less for their tax dollars": property-owning Californians are paying fewer tax dollars, relatively, than they did in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the erroneous statements of Republican politicians, California's state tax burden is now only middling -- approximately 17th nationally, and far lower than other high-cost/high-service states.

Your credibility would recover if you ran a second article, parallel to this one, that discusses the revenue side of the changes in California fiscal policy, rather than falsely suggesting that shifts in expenditures alone explain our current predicament.

We'll see if there's any response!

The ironies of compensation

2008-12-22T13:47:58Z

Read today, courtesy of the AP: Bank executives are still raking in large salaries:

Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.

Now, all those perks surely feel nice after a long day swilling government subsidies -- the chauffeur to the private plane that takes you to your country club.

But clearly, the compensation committees at banks have an evil subplot: they also offer professional money management. That is, they ensured that those executives' hard-earned millions were carefully invested in a balanced portfolio of hedge funds, private equity placements and highly leveraged equities strategies, all sheltered with appropriate derivatives.

The economy gives with one hand, but it takes with the other!

Republican tactics: a mystery?

2008-12-11T06:04:19Z

After the election results, and given the enormous pressures for action on various fiscal, financial, and economic fronts, one might assume that the leadership (such as it is) of the Republican coalition would have sat down together and calculated how best to shape the course of events along the lines they prefer.

In such a calculation, further, one might think that they would reason thus: "We can shape various bills and policies during the urgent lame-duck session, when we still have much more influence, especially in the Senate, or we can wait until January when the Democrats are going to be much better positioned, institutionally, to roll us or to pressure a few weak reeds to get what they want (oh the socialistic horror of it all!)"

The First Duck has apparently gotten this point: he's been surprisingly helpful and cooperative with the Obama transition team. Not only is this probably genuinely better for the country than gridlock and obstruction (as even a dyed-in-the-feathers crimson Repuglican might admit), but it's his last chance to affect outcomes at all. Better a modest mortgage rescue plan with limits he favors, than nothing now, deeper crisis, and a sweeping Obama/Democratic plan in two months. Better a modest auto company bailout with as many strings as possible, and taken out of the existing funds, than nothing now, deeper crisis, and sweeping Obama/Democratic plan in two months.

Moreover, Bush's approach is working, from his perspective. White House pressure really did scale back the auto bailout and shift the funding to Bush's preferred source. Heck, even Bob Gates is staying at the Pentagon....not Bush's favorite guy, to be sure, but still, he's Bush's appointment.

But the Senate Republicans -- about to lose a substantial number of their seats in the New Year -- apparently haven't gotten the picture. They are huffing and stomping about how terrible ANY bailout would be for the auto companies, and that now's their chance to break the evil UAW forever...which is simply stupid. They are certainly able to block an auto bailout bill now, but if that leads to an escalating crisis in Detroit, they'll own the consequences. Moreover, an escalating crisis -- and some escalation does seem likely if a bridge loan doesn't go through -- will probably lead the new Congress in January to pass something much more sweeping. Yes, the Dems don't have a filibuster-proof majority, it's true. But with the Minnesota race likely to drag until who knows when, and with 58 Democrats/Independents versus 41 Republicans seated, it seems much more likely that the Democrats can peel off the one or two votes they need to suppress a filibuster...and even if they can't, repeated filibusters will have a devastating effect on the Republican brand, which is not exactly in great shape even now.

In short, the law of politics, one would think, is always: use your power and influence when you have it, rather than obstructing until you don't have any power and influence.

Pity that McConnell and his band of dimwits never took Politics 101!

Chickens roosting watch (Kristol edition)

2008-11-17T14:36:23Z

One of the minor forms of relief available during our present economic difficulties has been watching Republican pundits squirm and twitch as they try to evade the history of their own rhetoric. Today's example, from William Kristol in the New York Times:

After discussing how Republicans have the Democrats just where they want them, trapped helplessly in Washington in charge of the White House and Congress while Republican governors are poised for, well, coping with a catastrophe, Kristol turns his laser-like thoughts to the economy. You see, the key is that Republicans need to tell a good story about why the financial meltdown is not their fault.

"I don't see why a commitment to free markets requires permitting banks or bank-like institutions to leverage their assets at 30 to 1. There's nothing conservative about letting free markets degenerate into something close to Karl Marx's vision of an atomizing, irresponsible and self-devouring capitalism."

Since it is exactly Mr. Kristol's wing of the Republican party that has spent thirty years since Reagan's "Government is not the solution, government is the problem" saying precisely that any form of regulation or oversight that goes beyond gentle avuncular suasion is tantamount to the rape of "free markets" (free markets which rule all, guide all, solve all problems, blessed be the free markets), his sudden turn is hilarious.

After all, who, exactly, does Mr. Kristol think will prevent banks and bank-like institions from leveraging their assets at 30 to 1. The government, of course! Regulation! In contrast, letting banks do as they will has been (at least according to three decades of Republican orthdoxy), an essential feature of the 'free market'.

But no: now it turns out that letting markets operate as 'atomizing', with each participant following only his or her own interest, is actually Marxist! I never thought I'd see Bill Kristol agree with Marx's critique of the policies and ideas of, well, Bill Kristol and all his Republican free-market absolutists, but now we've seen it. What fun!

Nailing it: "They prefer to insult your intelligence..."

2008-10-11T03:07:18Z

Tapped has a great piece on the late days of the Dole campaign, and how nasty it got. Tim Fernholz quotes a Michael Lewis line from a New Republic article that precisely nails one thing that bugs me so much about the McCain campaign (and Republican politics more generally):

"...from the beginning the Dole people have preferred to insult your intelligence than to craft more plausible lies."

Instantly my mind jumped to Tucker Bounds, our own domestic Baghdad Bob, and I realized this line perfectly described McCain's entire operation.

It is a strategy that worked for a very long time, too, we must admit. The campaigns (Dole, Bush x2, McCain) knew they were lying, the press knew they were lying, but the reporting somehow overlooked the obvious fact that the reporters' intelligence, and thus the intelligence of the American people, was being insulted.

Somehow, though -- perhaps through the magic of Sarah Palin's truly monumental anti-intellectualism -- the press has finally gotten fed up, on the whole. And without the Potemkin pundits toeing the line, McCain and Palin suddenly look like the liars they have been all along.

Naturally, there are plenty of Democratic politicians who have drawn from the same toolkit, but at least the better ones, even if they were simplifying, usually don't do it in a way that insulted everyone's intelligence. And one of Obama's great virtues has been his ability to sound human and serious when presenting material that is simplified -- because he obviously recognizes real complexity.

Republicans (and radical reactionaries more generally) don't like complexity, but when you mix that with hatred of thinking, perhaps it simply becomes too obviously self-destructive for most of the media -- (intelligent, well-educated, articulate, engaged) -- to go along.

High time too!

David Brooks -- wrong, even when he's right

2008-10-10T14:46:37Z

Having already expressed his legitimate and honorable disdain for the anti-ideas trend in the Republican party, most visibly illustrated by Sarah Palin's statements and responses to them, David Brooks explores a very real issue more deeply in today's NY Times. Picking up the anti-ideas theme, he laments the Republicans' turn to a form of what he calls 'class warfare' that contrasts the wholesome Joe Sixpacks of the heartland to the point-headed overeducated effete nattering nabobs on the coasts.

Whoops, no that was Spiro Agnew, but even if the anti-intellectual card is a tried and true part of Republican strategy, Brooks is right that McCain and Palin, (probably at the direction of the Rovian machine) are taking this idea to new lows.

But Brooks simply can't be bothered to be accurate, even when he's pointing to something real: like the Republican's he criticizes, a good story always outweighs actual reality-based analysis in his work.

Most commentors on the NYT comment thread are picking up on Brooks' comment that "Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive." But while many would disagree with his characterization, one can write this off as a little spin and rhetorical flair, and his statements represent an opinion, which is something that does belong in an op-ed column.

But there's a much bigger blooper at the heart of his argument. He repeates a Fred Barnes line that George W. Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast."

Fact check, fact check, David. The Northeast Corridor alone has some 55 million inhabitants, or 18% of the US population (Wikipedia). The rest of the East Coast may not be Ivy territority, but it is not unpopulated. Meanwhile, most of the population of California, Oregon and Washington live along the coast, making up another 30 million or so.

Turns out that while the East and West coast don't form the majority, it is not true that the 'vast majority' of American's live elsewhere. This may help explain why the Republican party's strategy is not working very well.

Bailout blues: Kuttner and Foster in the LA Times

2008-09-29T20:43:42Z

In today's LA times, ( http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oew-kuttner-foster29-2008sep29,0,5647742.story ), two economists express their view on the current bailout's failure. One, Robert Kuttner, suggests a Roosevelt-style mortgage purchase/refinance model, while J. D. Foster from the Heritage Foundation waves off into the distance and says it's really all about Social-Security-and-Medicare (I'm not kidding).

The Times only allows 650 character comments -- barely enough to warm up: here's a loger response.
------
I'm scarcely convinced by J. D. Foster's transparent attempt to shift the bogeyman and the blame to the United States' relatively modest social insurance plans. To be sure, Medicare costs are a genuine problem, but they exist in an entirely different time-frame than the current financial crisis, which is only very loosely connected to the United States' (and the individual states') fiscal problems -- most of which follow from the irresponsible Bush tax cuts.

Moreover, I find it simply offensive that Mr. Foster treats individual borrowers as equals to the investment banks and mortgage firms that have leveraged us into the current financial crisis. In fact, I have a responsible mortgage, which I have never been late paying. I guess that exempts me from Mr. Foster's disdain -- but it does absolutely nothing to shield me from the madness of irresponsible lending that triggered the current financial crisis.

Moreover, while mortgages and bad real estate lending are an important component in setting off the crisis, they are dwarfed by the collapse of the huge derivatives market, which itself has almost nothing to do with mortgage lending, and which was going to crash inevitably anyway -- if not over mortgages, then over interest rate hedges, or commodity hedges, or some other even more exotic leveraging bet that, in the end, had to go bad.

I have more confidence in Kuttner's plan, though here too, we need to acknowledge that the US government of today is no longer the US government that Franklin Roosevelt led after 1932. As we have seen in department after department during the Bush years, rot and corruption and inside dealing have become the norm in too much of the Federal government (and not just under Republican administrations, although most obviously under them). Is the Treasury (a branch of Goldman Sachs) and the other departments really able to act in the public interest, rather than in the interest of the well-organized patrons that will offer lucrative lifetime wealth to many Federal decision-makers after their stint at government salaries?

Tucker Bounds -- making Baghdad Bob look credible

2008-09-11T21:54:54Z

The NY Times has run a straightforward article exposing the falsehoods in one of McCain's recent ads. At the end, in good media fashion, the article provided a comment from each campaign, as follows:

The Obama campaign expressed outrage over the commercial, with Bill Burton, a spokesman, describing it as “shameful and downright perverse.”

But Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said, “the Obama campaign did not and cannot dispute a shred of the content in the ad.”

People like Bounds fascinate me. I mean, it's not easy to make Baghdad Bob, Saddam Hussein's former press secretary, look credible and transparent. (Baghdad Bob was the man telling journalists that US soldiers were committing mass suicide out of despair at their failure to advance into Iraq...when the soldiers were in fact outside the building where Bob was talking to the media). Baghdad Bob set a high standard for being truly and monumentally out of it, and for shamelessly repeating the most absurd lies.

But Bounds has got him beat, I'm afraid.

And one has to wonder: what sort of moral formation, what sort of education and shaping of a person's personality, could result in such utter disregard for elementary truthfulness? Bounds' disinterest in the truth is so obvious and extreme (as shown in his notorious CNN interview, recently) that it is clearly dysfunctional for the cause he thinks he's supporting. He's too obviously dissimulating, his agenda is too easily visible, for him to perform his function effectively. But apparently he doesn't see this, nor does Senator McCain.

One more strike against McCain's judgment -- though it's hard not to feel a little pity for an elderly and frequently confused Senator who was clearly given an ultimatum by his party's insiders to hand over the shreds of his campaign to the Rove team headed by Steven Schmidt and fronted by Tucker Bounds.

Schmidt is a familiar type in politics since the days of Rome; ruthless, focused, and absolutely confident that pure power is the only reality that matters. One can respect him even while recognizing that his approach to politics is loathsome and ultimately destructive. But Bounds can't play the same role, because he actually has to talk to people who want real information, or who disagree with his boss. Thus, constant dissimulation and mendacity is his fate, until it swallows up his whole persona. Not just a liar, but one who has sold his soul to his lies...it's simply sad.

First kindergarten sex, now wolves: You ARE being manipulated

2008-09-10T19:43:10Z

Many pro-Obama and progressive commentators are noting the McCain campaign's recent ads allegedly about 'education' (really sex and children) and 'opposition research' (really about carnivores attacking women). As even a simpleton can see, the ads are based largely on obvious falsehoods, and even if not, it's not clear exactly what's so bad about the alleged behavior. But the trajectory of these adds convinces me that their purpose has very little to do with their overt content (which means that responding to the content is a distraction that will let them work unhindered).

Here's what I see: McCain and Schmidt, following the latest version of the Rove approach, are systematically running ads designed to provoke strong atavistic emotions (even if only for a second). A viewer may watch the 'kindergarten sex education' ad or the 'wolves' ad, and afterwards say "Well, that didn't seem right, or fair." But while watching, the image of a lone alien male connected to issues of sexuality and children, or the image of a helpless woman facing a pack of predatory wolves, and their ripping her flesh, have laid down a track in our hindbrain memory, one reinforced by near-instinctive feelings of fear and disgust.

Now, for many voters, such memories won't have much impact, since their deliberative faculties will override the impact. But for someone undecided -- especially for a low-information undecided voter who enters the voting booth not quite sure, and ready to 'vote his/her gut feeling', those strong unconscious fears and emotions associated with one candidate can make the difference. And the election may well be decided by exactly such 'independent' and gut-feeling voters.

McCain's strategy rests not just on mud and lies, I'm convinced -- and as the arrival of TWO such ads confirms. This is a carefully calibrated strategy, one driven by research on the emotional reactions of focus groups using lie-detector-like biometric technology. Even if the focus group doesn't 'agree' with the ad, McCain/Schmidt's people have measured their non-verbal emotional reaction, and they are tuning their ads for maximum impact at that level, without caring ,uch about the ads' truth or even muddiness.

The question is: how does one fight back against this tactic? One possiblity is to counterpunch, using the same methods, but that's despicable.

Another is to widely disseminate disdain and mockery of the weakness the ads reveal -- but it's hard to know whether such mockery will reach the target audience.

A third is to build positive associations and warm fuzzies -- but warmth and identification, while powerful emotions, are more difficult to build than fear and disgust, which we are built to respond to immediatly.

A fourth, and an important one, is to powerfully push the meme that "you are being manipulated." People, no matter what their views, don't like being treated like puppets on a string. Somone - not necessarily the Obama campaign - probably needs to uncover the 'hidden persuaders' as loudly as possible. Remember how books on this topic keep being best sellers: we're vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, but we're also primed to be suspicious of being manipulated, especially nowadays.

I hope that the Obama campaign has expected these dishonorable tactics and prepared a powerful response!