Month: April 2009

E.D. Kain vents:

Fox News is simply not conservative.  The fact of the matter is, I find NPR and even News Hour more conservative than Fox – but in a different sense, I suppose, than the standard boiler plate conservatism that has so infested American politics.  What I mean to say is that the conservatism of Fox News tends to be wrapped up in loud, divisive, trashy television that is cheap and ugly and reactionary and essentially all things distasteful that conservatives should look at with scorn and antipathy.  The measured, reserved, thoughtful and culturally sensible tone of NPR is far more conservative.  I’d rather my kids listen to it than watch Glenn Beck.

Joyner adds his own two cents.

(Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty.)

Mark Thoma writes in favor of more regulation:

…after decades and decades of instability in the 1800s and early 1900s, followed by the massive bank failures of the early 1930s, regulations were imposed to stabilize the banking system. The result was sixty years of calm in the financial sector. That's hardly a failure of regulation. It wasn't until the shadow banking system began growing outside of the regulatory umbrella that problems began to reemerge..bringing about another decades long period of relative stability will require the regulatory umbrella to be extended to cover all firms within both the traditional and non-traditional (or shadow) banking system, hedge funds included.

Hilzoy gets an e-mail from sleep expert Dr. James Horne. The memos released last week cite his work to 'prove' that sleep deprivation works as an interrogation technique:

Even if one was to be pragmatic and claim that this form of sleep deprivation produced ‘desired results’, I would doubt whether the state of mind would be able to produce credible information, unaffected by delusion, fantasy or suggestibility.

A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.

— Emily Dickinson.

Greg Mankiw blasts Obama's latest cost saving measures:

 $100 million represents .003 percent of $3.5 trillion.

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had be cut? By $3 over the course of the year–approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

Yeah, it was pathetic in the grand scheme of things. But I thought it was a good sign that Obama understands totally valid concerns about future debt. If the tea-parties did nothing but remind Washington that many people out there do care about deficits and debt and spending – and rightly so – then you can almost forgive the opportunism and shrillness and amnesia about the last eight years that came with them. Still, it's only fair to give Obama some lee-way during his first year on long-term entitlement reform. He's pledged to tackle it, and better to keep him to that than to lob bombs and throw hissy fits right now. Joe Weisenthal adds his own thoughts.

Joe Klein gets it:

When presented fairly, with nuance, the bankers have an argument that needs to be taken seriously: when it comes to actual goods and services–which hybrid automobile engine is best–the market is inevitably a better judge of quality than the government. But untrammeled markets, in which Ponzi products are traded back and forth, need to be policed and eliminated–and the government has an important, and necessarily intrusive, role in channeling us back toward a rock-solid foundation and away from the flim-flam that is choking us. That is where we stand now. That is what the bankers refuse to acknowledge, but it is what the public voted for last November.

Wall St. doesn't appear to have picked up on this yet. But I do think that when recovery begins, Obama's reform of the banking system may be his most important domestic legacy – and he'll be judged centrally on it.

This interactive map from Slate shows where job losses have been the highest.

Salon hosted a debate on the politics of marriage equality. Here's Jonathan Rauch:

…it was not until 1997 that you had a majority of Americans tell Gallup that it was OK for blacks and whites to intermarry. And it is not until 2008 when Gallup had a tied result on whether homosexuality was a moral lifestyle; the public is still divided down the middle on that. So the change may be rapid, but it's only rapid compared to earlier changes that were very slow. So I don't see in my lifetime getting to a point where same-sex marriage is completely uncontroversial. I do think we stand a pretty good shot of getting to a point where it's at least consensus uncontroversial.

Today I continued to grapple with the torture fallout. Fox News and the Cheney right (sadly joined by moderates Buckley and Peggy) continued to diminish it, but McCain at least used the T-word. We got a glimpse at Mormon porn, Philips TV put out a blockbuster ad, Conor proposed some great budget cuts as Glenn Reynolds postured, we celebrated 4/20 with laser-shooting nipples, a heart-wrenching email shared the simple but profound comforts pot can provide, and Cheney seemed to offer an opening for a Truth Commission.