Month: February 2010

Newsweek writers and editors debate whether Joe Stack should be called a terrorist. Greenwald fumes:

[A]ccording to Newsweek's Managing Editor, only a foreigner who "protests the American government" can be a Terrorist. Americans cannot be. Indeed, according to her, "all foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American government" are "Terrorists," which presumably includes Muslims who fight against American armies invading their countries (which is how the U.S. Government uses the term, too). Meanwhile, Leftist Americans who engage in violence are "radicals," while those on the Right who do so are merely "protesters, survivalists, and separatists." Only anti-American foreigners can be Terrorists. That's really what she said.

So Tim McVeigh was a criminal. Newsweek really deserves its irrelevance, doesn't it?

Bruce Bartlett is amazed that conservatives still believe cutting taxes produces a cut in spending:

[T]he whole premise of starve-the-beast theory has gone straight down the toilet. Yet, to my amazement, Republicans and Republican lackeys continue to talk about cutting taxes with no corresponding spending cuts as if it is the height of fiscal responsibility. (See this silly Larry Kudlow column and Diane Rogers’ evisceration of it here.) When pressed, they fall back on starving the beast even though there is not one iota of evidence giving it operational meaning since at least 1996, when Ross Perot last ran for president. It has become, in fact, nothing but a license for Republican fiscal irresponsibility.

A couple of years ago I went through the history of starve-the-beast theory in great detail here. Ironically, the originator of the idea turned out to be none other than John Kenneth Galbraith. To the extent that I personally had any role to play in putting this awful idea into play I regret it.

Reihan flags an interview with Peter Thiel:

Wired: What happens if we don’t get the growth everyone expects?

Thiel: If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static.

That's what Betsey Stevenson, an economist who studies happiness, says:

What we see is that happiness rises with the log of income. I think that's where people get confused. A 10% rise in income is associated with a similar change in happiness at any income level. But when your income is $20,000 that 10% is a lot less money than when your income is $200,000. As your income goes up, the extra happiness or life satisfaction you get per dollar shrinks because it is a smaller proportion of your income. But we see that happiness rises quite steadily with the log of income.

A poor individual or a poor country is going to get a lot more happiness out of a dollar than a rich person or a rich country. But a 10% increase in income in a poor country is going to get us about the same amount of increase in happiness as a 10% rise in income in a rich country.

A lot of economists had hypothesized that relative income is what matters, so it doesn't matter if I get richer if everybody else is also getting richer. In that case my happiness isn't going to change. It only changes if my station in society changes. But, in fact, we find that richer countries are happier than poorer countries and as countries get richer, their citizens get happier. I should note, however, that there is one exception. The United States has gotten wealthier over the last 40 years and we haven't gotten any happier on average.

Lots more research on happiness here.

Honolulu, Hawaii, 7 am

A reader writes:

I can't believe you didn't post the best part of the story on your blog:

Asked about the tag VIBR8R, the employee admitted that could be interpreted as vibrator. "That definitely slipped through our process,” the employee said.

Heh.

Today on the Dish we continued to analyze the OPR report, with help from Scott Horton, a reader, and last year's top Dish emailer. Another reader called out Catholics over torture with some historical perspective. Elsewhere, Drum and Steinglass differed over whether to deem Joe Stack a terrorist, Mark Shea wondered about the reaction to his daughter had she been Muslim, and Steve King went off the deep end again.

Andrew crafted a long response to Chait over implied anti-semitism, just in time for Abe Foxman to use the smear straight up. More ugliness here.  Ackerman and Friedersdorf piled on Thiessen, Palin got checked by an actress with Down Syndrome, and a Virginia politician spouted some awful things about handicapped children. HCR-related analysis from Jonathan Bernstein, Nate Silver, Peter Suderman, David Brooks, Ezra Klein, and John Graham. Tripp Palin could be off to the death panels.

Andrew's weekly column focused on the ironies surrounding gay conservatives in the US and the UK. We featured a new and revealing protest video from Iran, with further analysis here. Some final words on Sorba here, pot update here, Scientologist update here, and cool ad here. And this MHB was especially brilliant.

Finally, the Dish confirmed the age of consent within the Vatican – and it's lower than you might think.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

I am an American Jew who has served as soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces IDF.  I love Israel and am therefore deeply troubled how the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has launched Israel on a path of self destruction. One day the West Bank Palestinians will stop asking for a state and start asking for the right to vote. And that will be the beginning of the end of the Jewish State

So please know that there are many Jews who know and understand that our real friends, the ones rooted in reality and not biblical fantasies, are going to resist the settler movement and occupation of the West Bank – simply because it is in the best interests of Israel to do so. 

In Israel this perspective is fairly conventional and represents nearly half the electorate.  But when one expresses this opinion in the United States it’s labeled as an anti-semitic attack.  The only reason I have not been labeled as an anti-semite, or at least as a self-hating Jew by my peers here in NY, is that I can trump any accusation by the fact that I actually served in the IDF. (This detail tends to drive some people a little loopy; the cognitive dissonance is simply too much for them to bear.)

Tom Ricks gets an e-mail from Nir Rosen. An excerpt:

It's been frustrating to read the latest hysteria about sectarianism returning to Iraq, the threat of a new civil war looming, or even the notion that Iraq is "unraveling." I left Iraq today after an intense mission on behalf of Refugees International. My colleague Elizabeth Campbell and I traveled comfortably and easily throughout Baghdad, Salahedin, Diyala and Babil. We were out among Iraqis until well into the night every day, often in remote villages, traveling in a normal Toyota Corolla….

From the beginning of the occupation the US government and media focused too much on elite level politics and on events in the Green Zone, neglecting the Iraqi people, the "street," neighborhoods, villages, mosques. They were too slow to recognize the growing resistance to the occupation, too slow to recognize that there was a civil war and now perhaps for the same reason many are worried that there is a "new" sectarianism or a new threat of civil war. The US military is not on the streets and cannot accurately perceive Iraq, and journalists are busy covering the elections and the debaathification controversy, but not reporting enough from outside Baghdad, or even inside Baghdad.

Iraqis on the street are no longer scared of rival militias so much, or of being exterminated and they no longer have as much support for the religious parties. Maliki is still perceived by many to be not very sectarian and not very religious, and more of a "nationalist." Another thing people would notice if they focused on "the street" is that the militias are finished, the Awakening Groups/SOIs are finished, so violence is limited to assassinations with silencers and sticky bombs and the occasional spectacular terrorist attack — all manageable and not strategically important, even if tragic. Politicians might be talking the sectarian talk but Iraqis have grown very cynical.

Ezra Klein defends the excise tax against Brooks:

Lifting or delaying the excise tax would require our Congress of the Future to find 60 votes or an offset equal to every dollar of the excise tax's revenue (in which case repealing the excise tax doesn't much matter). And if we've learned anything this year, it's that 60 ain't easy.