Month: September 2010

Palin takes on Rove as a "Good Ol' Boy." That's interesting, don't you think? Douthat sketches two possibilities for the future:

[I]f O’Donnell’s likely general-election fate becomes a cautionary tale about the limits of caring only about ideological purism, then the lessons of Delaware in 2010 might serve the party in good stead come Iowa and New Hampshire in 2012. But of course, it’s equally possible that O’Donnell’s defeat will be blamed on her abandonment by the party leadership, rather than her own failings as a standard-bearer (I’m sure that will be Mark Levin’s line!), in which case rather than taking the edge off the base’s anti-establishment mood it could just end up getting spun into an ever-more-powerful narrative of populist grievance.

I think Palin is now the GOP leader, and has now ousted even Rove. So these nuances will be lost in the aftermath. This is a radical, cultural revolt that the elites have no way of controlling, and which they have encouraged at every turn.

What also strikes me is how O'Donnell disproves the notion that the tea party is uninterested in social issues. O'Donnell is a fundamentalist fanatic – a social reactionary of almost comic proportions. She opposes legal abortion in cases of rape and incest, opposes masturbation, women in the military and sees gays as "curable". And yet there seems no tension between her and the fiscally-oriented tea-partiers. This hope that somehow they can mean the down-playing of Christianism seems like wishful thinking to me. And the idea of these people running foreign policy on the basis of religious doctrine, Greater Israel, institutionalized torture and anti-Muslim bigotry, is terrifying.

A new paper finds that Cash For Clunkers failed as a stimulus:

[A]lmost all of the additional purchases under the program were pulled forward from the very near future; the effect of the program on auto purchases is almost completely reversed by as early as March 2010 – only seven months after the program ended. The effect of the program on auto purchases was significantly more short-lived than previously suggested. We also find no evidence of an effect on employment, house prices, or household default rates in cities with higher exposure to the program.

Today on the Dish, Christine O'Donnell won the Delaware primary, a scary prospect for the future of the conservative movement. Weigel didn't think she had a chance in Delaware; and Malkin jumped on Rove. Mitch Daniels may run in 2012; and a GOP-ruled House could finally make the movement grow-up, forced to battle Obama's calm and poise. The Tea Party tiger continued to bite the GOP in the ass; and now 2012 is Palin's to lose.

Alaska experienced Not Fox News Islam; Brian Williams had a platform and didn't know it; and the Forbes brand devolved further. Andrew defended Marty; and D'Souza finally got the take-down he deserves.

We looked at what people bought online which didn't include seats to see the Pope. James Parker exposed the vaudeville roots of Jackass; bicyclists were people too; and Judge Judy in slow motion made everyone sound drunk. Creepy ad watch here; VFYW here; quote for the day here; Yglesias award nominee here; email of the day here; MHB here; and FOTD here. Dynamic duos do it better than one and robots learned how to deceive.

–Z.P.

A reader writes:

As a criminal justice based victim advocate, I’d also like to point out that most victims of crime would NOT be open to the idea of the offender being released early for any reason.  They routinely protest parole and are angered by things like “good time” equating to early release.  Often the impact of the offender’s action reverberates in the victim’s life well beyond the time the offender serves.  And often the only sense of vindication they feel is knowing that the person who hurt them will not only not be able to hurt anyone else, but will not be free to enjoy their ‘golden years’.

Another writes:

How many more young people would commit murders if they didn't have to contemplate growing old in prison?

If the number is one, then it is worth keeping murderers imprisoned into old age. Given that we can never know, we must go with the assumption that it is at least one. Jamelle Bouie apparently takes the position that the only goal of incarceration is preventing a particular individual from committing another crime, but punishment has always had multiple goals, including, of course, general deterrence.

Another:

I believe that one other issue with this proposal is that it would undermine efforts to end the death penalty. Many states instituted life without parole as an alternative to the death penalty to satisfy the public's concerns.  If states were to begin releasing these murderers, they would be breaking a bargain that they made with their citizens in which life without parole was substituted for the death penalty.  Releasing the murderers would prove cynics and death penalty proponents correct and would reinvigorate the pro-death penalty movement.

Also, one of your correspondents gratuitously blamed Reagan for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.  In the United States, deinstitutionalization began in the 1950s and was largely completed before Reagan was president.  And, if the writer was referring to Reagan's time as governor of California, I would point out that it also occurred under the governors of the other 49 states as well.  I know that in New York, where I am from, the deinstitutionalization movement was often associated with Governor Rockefeller.  But it was national phenomenon.  It was a reaction to the development of new medications, and was promoted by policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.  Wikipedia has a useful summary.

That's what Jason Kuznicki believes O'Donnell's win means. Drum isn't so sure:

If O'Donnell loses in November and turns out to literally be the difference between 50 seats in the Senate and 51, then plenty of Republicans will be gnashing their teeth. But if the net result is that they get 46 seats instead of 47, and those 46 are considerably more conservative than they would have been without tea party fervor, I'll bet most of them will consider it a pretty good bargain.

Jonathan Bernstein has a hard time drawing conclusions:

I'd separate the effects (likely some 1-4 fewer GOP Senators taking office in January) from the explanations of what exactly has happened.  Is this, as Ed Kilgore thinks, "the final victory in a Fifty Year War waged by the conservative movement for control of the Republican Party"?  Maybe (and I like Kilgore's post in general; I think he's right about Tea Partyism), but I'm not confident about that.  Another way to look at it is in terms not of ideological differences, but in terms of a fight within the conservative movement between purists and professionals over best tactics.  Or perhaps we're seeing proxy skirmishes in the 2012 presidential nomination process (DeMint?  Yup, he's a player).  Or perhaps it's a handful of local situations (purist candidates defeating weak alternatives in Colorado and Nevada, a local personal feud in Alaska, a strong candidate possibly miscast as a purist in Florida, and then in Delaware a real honest-to-goodness moderate who, unlike almost all of the others, really was out of step with his party on the issues.

John Sides defends political science:

Let’s leave aside the notion that “multiple regression analysis” is the “only legitimate tool.” That’s the impression of someone who doesn’t read much political science. I’m more interested in Middle East peace. Here’s my question: if Hayward picks up the American Economic Review, does he envision that their mathematical formulas will produce global prosperity? That’s the standard to which he seems to hold academic research. If so, he should be disappointed by virtually the entire corpus of social science, and perhaps by a decent bit of the hard sciences as well. After all, there’s still that cancer thing.

Charles Pierce bashes the latest Palin-clone:

[O'Donnell] is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government. She is what you get when you sell to the country that nothing government can do will help, and that the government is an alien thing, and that politics is nothing more than the active public display of impotent grievance. She is what politics produces when you turn them into a game show and the coverage of them over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. She is what you get when political journalism reduces politics to numbers on a scoreboard, divorcing them from the real world consequences of what are increasingly seen as cute little eccentric decisions.

She is, in other words, the very model of a modern Palin Republican.

Defending Obama, I wrote:

[P]rotection for unions. Again, there is no card-check legislation. It was not a priority. It was not snuck into the stimulus package.

Adam Ozimek agrees that "Obama has not done everything he could to help unions, and he’s accomplished some thing despite strong union opposition…" But:

I do think that the stimulus did suffer as a result of handouts to unions in the form of the prevailing wage provision.

This is the part of the Recovery Act that requires that any construction project funded by stimulus must comply with Davis-Bacon. This law prevents companies from areas where labor costs are low from bidding on contracts based on wages they would be willing to pay. So a construction company from a poor county with high unemployment that can pay workers $20 an hour loses it’s competitive advantage when bidding on projects in a nearby high wage county where prevailing wages are $40 an hour. This distortion gives an unfair advantage to local companies, creates less jobs, and means money will be spent more inefficiently.