Month: May 2009

Joe The Plumber

Kinda like Glenn The Blogger:

Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party — and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience. But he also said he wouldn't support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits.

For a serious grappling with fiscal imbalance, check out Bruce Bartlett's latest column. Money quote:

David Walker of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation suggests that the retirement age (both early and normal) must rise, the formula used to calculate initial Social Security benefits should be revised and the index for calculating cost-of-living increases be reduced.

Walker also acknowledges that higher revenues will be necessary, a view endorsed, somewhat surprisingly, by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was chief economic adviser to John McCain last year. As he said at the bipartisan conference, "The era of tax-cutting is over."

Malkin Award Nominee

"I don't understand how we're going to raise young men to be good family men in a culture where the government tells them that the idea that a child has a father as well as a mother is an example of hateful bigotry — but, that's what gay marriage is about," – Maggie Gallagher.

I'll be sure to let my mum and dad, brother and sister, and niece and nephews know. They somehow missed this lesson in my wedding ceremony.

Can A Blog Make Facts Matter?

Ezra Klein makes a common point about the need for newspapers:

The news business, we all agree, is an inefficient enterprise. But it has benevolent inefficiencies. Not every story in the paper maximizes readership and thus advertising revenue. The low-readership stories, however, aren't misfires. They're aimed at a different audience: Empowered elites. They make the political system aware of problems, or they alert the political system to the fact that other people are aware of problems.

And that only works because newspapers are hard to ignore.

The result is a startlingly inefficient from a revenues standpoint but fairly important from a civic accountability standpoint. Newspapers run popular articles and use their resulting readership to make their unpopular articles matter to the relevant constituencies. Regulators, say. Or city councilmen who wanted the paper's future endorsement. That's the thing a blogger can't do. They can get the information. But they can't make it matter. They're easier to ignore. In that way, the fear isn't that we'll stop having news. But that that news will stop forcing accountability.

I'm not sure I agree. A good blog, with a tenacious blogger, on a difficult subject, can keep at a subject with intensity newspapers are hard-pressed to match. And as long as there are meta-blogs or aggregators or edited blogs that can highlight niche blogging on important, less-read subjects, these issues can be brought to the fore. Ideally, blogs and newspapers form a helpful nexus. But both can and will evolve to save the old civic function of the press.

The Outrage Isn’t Going Anywhere?

Please. Count me alongside Ryan Avent in his swing at Simon Johnson and James Kwak:

There is obviously a risk that when conditions improve the impetus for reform will be lost. But I think there’s a pretty substantial window in which reform can take place. It’s more important to do regulatory reform right than to do it quickly. I don’t see a vague concern that in the next year anger at and worries about the banking system will evaporate as a good reason to undertake a tricky and risky nationalization now.

I have learned to judge Obama from the long view. And I bet banking regulation will be a lot tighter at the end of this first term than at the beginning.

Malkin Award Nominee

"And, you know, the mainstream media portraying this as Republicans desperately seizing on an issue as a way to embarrass the Obama administration. Well, that's what an opposition does. And it isn't as if terrorists running around in America is not a serious issue," – Charles Krauthammer on relocating terror suspects from Gitmo.

Where exactly are terrorists going to be "running around"?