Month: June 2010

You've got to be kidding. The latest deconstruction of the latest lies and flim-flam from the half-term former governor.

"There is nothing progressive about a government that consistently spends more than it can raise in taxation," – Lord Myners, the former Labour minister for the financial sector.

Those who believe that Sarah Palin has quit politics or does not have a future in elective office have some 'splaining to do. If she's irrelevant, why the following statements from last night:

"Her decision to get – and stay – involved in the race here in South Carolina was a huge boon to our campaign, because it caused a lot of South Carolinians to take a second look at a rising in the polls but once-little known state legislator who was fighting to give them back their government,” Haley spokesman Tim Pearson said of Palin. …

“Governor Palin’s endorsement was integral to the success of our campaign,” Fiorina spokeswoman Julie Soderlund told POLITICO. “She provides the ‘good housekeeping seal of approval’ for conservative, outsider candidates. After earning her endorsement we saw an immediate spike in support for Carly amongst conservatives, who represent the vast majority of Republican primary voters.” 

There was some hope that her recent endorsement misfires might signal a declining appeal with the base. Nuh-huh. She owns the GOP base. The most hopeful inference is that she wants to be a queen or king-maker – and not the queen herself. And that makes sense as long as you ignore every single thing she has ever done in her life and career.

(Photo: Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin speaks at RECon 2010, the International Council of Shopping Centers' annual global retail real estate convention, at the Las Vegas Convention Center May 23, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. By Ethan Miller/Getty Images.)

TNC asks:

If Obama yelled at his press conferences, kicked over the lectern and generally unfurled the Bruce Banner, the various news personalities would have more to talk about besides the fact that he refuses to do exactly that. It's not clear that such a display would, over the long term, move Obama's poll numbers a whit. I suspect the assembled personalities are concerned with numbers of their own. This is their right. It's also our right to wonder who this proposed tantrum would actually benefit.

Obama will be knocked by the partisans whatever he does. I have no issues with his handling of the oil spill so far. He's an adult, unlike many of his critics.

Josh Green notes how much leverage she now has in her righteous campaign against derivatives:

It doesn't seem like a stretch to conclude that Lincoln eeked out a win by convincing just enough voters that she was a Wall Street scourge. If her signature provision goes down in flames, she'll look toothless and weak, and almost certainly lose her seat. The bank lobby and the Obama administration (both oppose the Lincoln provision) may simply prove too strong and do the deed anyway. But their task got a whole lot harder.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research put out a new report on the fiscal burden of the American prison system (pdf):

We calculate that a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year and return the U.S. to about the same incarceration rate we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards). The large majority of these savings would accrue to financially squeezed state and local governments, amounting to about one-fourth of their annual corrections budgets. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.

(Hat tip: Economix)

A reader sends in his favorite cover of a Carpenters song. In honor of Trey Parker:

John Sides argues (twice) that the vast majority of Congress will be re-elected in the fall. Taylor Steven agrees:

I would argue that if the re-elect race for the House is 85% or higher, then most of the media narrative that we have been subjected to this year will end up being a lot of sound and fury that will have signified a whole lot of not all that much (and this strikes me as a likely result, to be honest).  Even if we have a result that is “historical” and is in the 80% range, it is hard to make the case that an incumbent re-election rate of that magnitude demonstrates a massive amount of voter anger.  The bottom line is that a substantially large percentage of the current House is returning in January (and in the Senate too, although the numbers under discussion are for the House only).

Edward Glaeser remains a fan of merit pay for teachers but it's easier to defend in theory than practice:

The problem is that any top-down push for incentives is easily subverted at the local level. A paper by Jay Greene and Stuart Buck provides a bevy of examples where schools said they had adopted merit pay, but in reality did anything but.

Professors Buck and Greene write of one instance in Arizona: “Algebra teachers were being rewarded merely for getting students to learn 10 percent more about algebra than they knew before studying that subject at all. This is not a high hurdle to clear.” As a result, they write, “even when a state creates a statewide merit pay program and legally bars spending the money on anything else, local school districts may still end up spending the funding on regular salaries unconnected to merit pay or on so-called merit pay programs with absurdly low standards for what constitutes ‘merit.’ ”

 

Doug McCune translates San Francisco's crime numbers into geographic peaks and valleys:

I’ve used a full year of crime data for San Francisco from 2009 to create these maps. The full dataset can be download from the city’s DataSF website. …Many of the maps have peaks in the Tenderloin, which is that high area sort of in the north-east center area of the city. Some are extremely concentrated (narcotics) and some are far more spread out (vehicle theft).

My favorite map is the one for prostitution (maybe “favorite” is the wrong choice of words there)…the prostitution arrests are peaking on Shotwell St. at the intersections of 19th and 17th….I love the way the mountain range casts a shadow over much of the city. There’s also a second peak in the Tenderloin (which I’m dubbing Mt. Loin).

(Hat tip: FD)