Month: July 2010

Christopher Papagianis and Reihan Salam pick apart our housing policy:

From 1994 to 2005, the homeownership rate reached record highs, thanks largely to innovations in the mortgage-finance market that reduced down payments and minimized equity … One effect was to reduce the social benefits of homeownership, because the benefits are a product of equity and not of the mere fact that a contract has been signed and a mortgage taken out. The relationship between homeownership and social goods had been misunderstood: The traits that enabled households to build up the savings necessary for significant down payments — hard work and the deferral of gratification — were misattributed to homeownership itself. Paying a mortgage did nothing to improve children’s educational outcomes; instead, the factors that gave rise to homeownership also led parents to raise children in a manner that led to greater educational attainment.

Without substantial down payments and conservative amortization schedules, the entire proposition of homeownership as a social good is turned on its head.

(Photoshop fail via BF)

Scott Horton reviews the series:

There are two critical questions I hope that the Priest and Arkin series will help us answer. The first is simple: does this enormous state security apparatus actually make the country any safer? Again, it’s not generally true that bigger is better. On this point, the historical example of the former Soviet Union and its allies is informative. Good literature already exists about the German Democratic Republic, in many ways the “model state” for the Soviet Empire. The massive state security apparatus of the GDR, focused on the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (“Stasi”) may ultimately have encompassed up to 10% of the working population of the country (PDF) in its network of agents and informants (“inoffizielle Mitarbeiter”).

This massive burden on the GDR’s economy contributed heavily to its inefficiency; in the name of state security, it degraded the quality of life for the entire nation. Yet the Stasi world is miniscule compared to the new system introduced after 9/11 in the United States. What are the consequences of this burden for the United States, and what is the concomitant payoff?

Second, we need to probe carefully the question of accountability. In theory, oversight is provided by a series of internal inspectors general and by Congress. In practice, however, it now seems obvious that security classifications have often been wielded not to protect national security but to avoid accountability. Max Weber’s classic study of the proclivities of bureaucracies would lead us to expect precisely this. Secrecy is used to avoid discovery of embarrassing errors. But even more troubling, it is used to avoid discovery of criminal conduct—especially corruption and the abuse of power.

Today on the Dish, Andrew sized up the congressional elections, glanced at the Angle-Reid race, shook his head at Journo-list's latest scandal, and cautioned against Breitbart's scoop on supposed racism in the USDA. (That caution proved prescient.) Some troubling rhetoric emerged from Netanyahu. Rahm watch here.

In Palin coverage, her political clout grew ever-stronger, the AP corrected her facts, Ambinder parsed her press strategy, readers pushed back against her bigotry on the Ground Zero mosque, Mark Liberman studied up on "refudiate," Doonesbury defended McGinniss, Andrew circled back to Weigel's Trig criticism, readers sounded off on the same, and another juxtaposed lil' Andrew and lil' Sarah.  Lots of drama from Wasilla here.

More on the WaPo police-state series here and here. Hitchens unloaded on supporters of Mel Gibson and a reader dissented over his and Andrew's criticism. Cali cannabis coverage here and Social Security here. In assorted commentary, Kornacki looked at Romney's record against female opponents, Bagehot checked in on Cameron's coalition, Drezner scrutinized smart sanctions, Brad Plumer perused what's left of the energy bill, TNC rubbed his brow over journalists blaming blacks for Prop 8, Balko backed gambling, and Douthat examined American meritocracy.  E.D. Kain and Timothy Lee added to the liberaltarian thread.

Anti-capitalist art here and funny dog video here.  MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. The latest window winner here.

— C.B.

It's below – all 43 minutes of it. The edited remarks start around 17 minutes in:

Doug Mataconis:

After watching Sherrod’s remarks in their full context, and in light of all the other information that has come out, it seems fairly clear that she was the victim of a horrible misrepresentation on the part of Breitbart, and a fairly cowardly abandonment by the powers-that-be in the Obama Administration.

Ambinder:

Given the set of facts, it was the right call: here was a USDA employee insinuating that she once gave a white farmer less attention than a black farmer because he was white.

Except that that's not what happened, nor what Shirley Sherrod did, nor what she said. The NAACP wasn't snookered. Vilsack was snookered. It doesn't matter why he was snookered, but he was. If he doesn't reinstate her, he'll look like a jerk who refused to admit he made a mistake. If he reinstates her, he might look like a wimp to some who object to Sherrod's economic inequality argument, or who refuse to acknowledge that Andrew Breitbart selectively edited a tape, but he'll look like a guy who made a rash decision and had the judgment to reverse it.

Nate Silver:

It was one thing for the White House to encourage Sherrod's resignation based on such flimsy evidence, thereby enabling Brietbart and other media-savvy activists who are engaged in trench warfare against it. That's bad enough. But it's another thing to refuse to re-hire her. One overarching critique of some of the less successful Presidencies of the recent past is that they suffer from a bunker mentality: they were either too stubborn, or too detached from reality, to acknowledge mistakes and correct errant courses of action. Although the mistakes over Sherrod may not be of the same magnitude as, for instance, the mistakes made in the Vietnam Era, it nevertheless seems that the only reason not to re-hire is that it would involve admitting you'd screwed up in the first place.

Update: Greg Sargent quotes a White House official who claims, contrary to Sherrod's story, that the White House didn't ask for Shirley Sherrod to resign or for the USDA to fire her.

Timothy Lee returns to the liberaltarian debate:

What libertarians and conservatives share isn’t a shared commitment to freedom so much as a common way of talking about freedom. Conservatives and Republicans like to invoke the Founding Fathers, talk about free markets and limited government, quote Hayek, and so forth. But political rhetoric is a lagging indicator of ideological commitments. A lot of fusionist slogans have become so shopworn that they’re what Orwell called dead metaphors. The fact that they’re often combined with calls to “keep your government hands off my Medicare”, promote “energy independence”, and build a police state along our Southern border suggests that these slogans are little more than empty rhetoric. When the typical Republican politiician says he cares about limited government, his purpose isn’t so much to express support for a specific policy agenda (most of the Republican policy agenda involves expanding government) so much as to signal membership in the fusionist political coalition.

That's McArdle's verdict:

Amazon reports that sales of e-books have finally surpassed sales of hardcovers.  That's a pretty momentous development.  I think it not only means that e-books are entering the mass adoption phase, but also that the price-discrimination model that publishers have used for decades may be on its way out.  There's no significant benefit to buying most disposable mass-market books in hardcover; people do it because they don't want to wait for the paperback.  In theory, they should be willing to pay extra to get a "new release" rather than wait a year, but in practice, people are surprisingly resistant…

And her devious dogsitter:

Radley Balko and Les Bernal are debating the legality of gambling this week. Here's Balko, who wants it legal:

Gambling is no different from any other consensual crime. Prohibiting it does not make it go away. It merely pushes it underground, where it is impossible to monitor for cheating and fraud, where the stakes are likely to be higher, and where problem gamblers stand to lose quite a bit more than merely their pay packet. When you make a popular activity illegal, you also create new sources of funding for career criminals. It is fairly well known that America's experiment with alcohol prohibition gave rise to the mob. But Al Capone and his rivals also brought in big money from the numbers racket.

Consensual crimes like gambling also produce no aggrieved victim to report or provide evidence of the crime. All parties to a sports wager or illegal card game participate willingly. So in order to enforce these laws, police must go out and search for criminal activity. This creates a number of problems.

Les Bernal's argument against gambling is near what you would expect.

Michael Roston wants to know why the WaPo isn't making more money off the series:

Maybe the Washington Post wants to preserve some modicum of purity in its Pulitzer Prize-grade coverage of duplication and mismanagement in the intelligence community. If that’s why the ‘immersive reading experience’ is ad-free, it’s reminiscent of the ‘news under glass in a museum‘ approach that I’ve criticized before. If you spend all this time and effort preparing a big story that isn’t controlled by the vagaries of the meme-chasing internet news cycle, and even come up with an innovative way to deliver it, you should also find a way to pay for it. If shows prepared in the public interest for PBS can have underwriters, surely the Post could have selected a suitable, conflict-of-interest-free advertiser for the scores of repeat visitors reading this story yesterday, today, tomorrow, and in the weeks ahead.