Month: January 2011

The Big Picture chronicles an incredible week of events. The Atlantic recently added the photo blog's creator, Alan Taylor, to its roster.

Sarah Palin's account of her hair-raising labor experience with Trig – in a word cloud.

Josh Marshall righteously and rightly defends TPM's coverage of Palin:

This is actually a real blind spot for liberals in general — the idea that things that are crazy or tawdry or just outrageous are really best ignored. Don't give them more attention. You're just giving them what they want. Or maybe it's not so practical and utilitarian. Maybe, they say, it's just beneath us. Focus on the important stuff.

On so many levels this represents an alienation from the popular political culture which is not only troubling in itself but actually damages progressive and center-left politics in general no end.

It's almost the fatal flaw. Democrats often console themselves that even when they don't win elections, usually their individual policies are more popular than those of Republicans. Too bad you can't elect a policy. It's true for instance that Health Care Reform — which still has more opponents than supporters — is pretty popular when you ask people about its individual components. But why is that? It's not random, because that pattern crops up again and again. It's another one of the examples where liberals — or a certain strain of liberalism — focuses way too much on the libretto of our political life and far too little on the score. It's like you're at a Wagner opera reading the libretto with your ear plugs in and think you've got the whole thing covered.

Another classic in the genre of Washington scorn (originally in the WSJ, author not clear):

This morbid aura is not enhanced by the tens of thousands of pinched-nosed former student-body presidents and yearbook hogs, who, with their antiseptically Waspish mates, are the living dead who run this litter-free city.

It's really not that bad. Once you take the time to find the characters rather than the careerists.

PM Carpenter relishes Obama's upswing and the GOP's diminishing support. Carpenter caps of his post by pointing to a "recent online exchange between the NY Times' David Brooks and Gail Collins:"

In assessing Obama's first two years, conservative Brooks noted, with undisguised glee, that "Republicans are more and more concerned that the guy has the wind at his back. Contempt has turned into fear and respect. All in all, kind of impressive"; and liberal Collins concluded, "here’s my bottom line: even if he never does anything else, he’s already accomplished a greater domestic agenda than any president in the last half-century. And if he can protect it, while getting all the moderates to forget about it, he’ll have pulled off the political coup of our lifetimes."

In Texas, there's a significant budget shortfall. Either tax increases, spending cuts, or some combination is needed. So a natural experiment arises: 

The Texas budget is going to be important for conservatives nationally. This state is very much the standard-bearer for the national Republican party, and for conservative Republicans in particular. We’ve got more than a 2/3 Republican majority in the state House, and almost as big of a majority in the Senate. We’ve got a Republican elected to every statewide office. Our governor has been a prominent national booster of the Tea Party, and our lieutenant governor is enough of a political chameleon that he’s currently going along with Tea Party sentiment.

Most importantly, we’ve got an electorate that believes this state should be setting an example for other states, and for the federal government as well. For now, at least, Texans seem to be in a mood to see these budget cuts through, even if it hurts. In short, if the conservative approach of balancing budgets through cutting spending without raising taxes can work anywhere, it has to work here, and it has to work now.

We'll be watching.

PPP's latest poll finds that 47% of Republicans want to nominate a well-known Republican like Palin, Huckabee, Romney, or Gingrich. By contrast, 56% of Independents want a fresh face:

The findings on this poll question nicely summarize the current state of the Presidential race – independents hate the current crop of GOP contenders and because of that Barack Obama is leading them in head to head match ups even in a lot of states where he has approval numbers that are under water. At the same time Republicans kind of like their leading lights and would be perfectly happy to nominate one of them. At some point though they're going to have to decide whether they should nominate someone they've known a long time and are comfortable with- or whether they'd rather go with a newer face they don't know as well, but who might actually be able to defeat Barack Obama.

Tyler Cowen and Jayme Lemke think we've entered one:

About one in 20 labor force participants lost their jobs, yet sales are back to normal. The obvious but uncomfortable implication is that many of those workers were not adding much value to their companies in the first place. In other words, there had been many “zero marginal productivity jobs” on the books, propped up by the previous boom and the housing bubble.

Once you see many of these jobs as having adding little economic value, it becomes difficult to imagine a quick fix. It is unlikely that just waiting for wages to fall will reemploy these people, nor is additional fiscal stimulus from the government likely to help. The unemployment problem seems daunting.

Cowen and Lemke recently made a more detailed version of this argument in Foreign Policy:

[T]he U.S. economy is going through some major structural shifts. It's not a question of getting back to where we were, but rather that the economy must solve a new problem of re-employing a lot of people who were not, in reality, producing very much in the first place. That's a steeper challenge than we had realized early in the stages of this recession — and so far policymakers have failed at meeting it.

Analysts still disagree on how rapidly the U.S. economy will recover. But they're missing the point. The era of low unemployment may be in our rearview mirror for a long time to come. 

Josef Joffe's argued that Tunisia's relative wealth spurred its groundswell of democratic reform. Noah Millman agrees that economics are a factor but he focuses on political context:

Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia all became more democratic after a period of aggressive industrialization and modernization. All these democracies then failed, giving way to revolutionary dictatorships of one for or another. Germany is now a modern democracy. Japan and Italy are modern free societies whose political systems have only just begun to open up from their post-war oligarchic character. Russia’s political system is still in flux, but few would characterize it as a modern democracy or a free society. In all these cases, dramatic economic change made for dramatic and even revolutionary political change. But a stable democratic order depended on an even more radical change in their positions in the international political order – first subjugation to and then alliance with the United States.

Inspired by the latest MHB, a reader points us to an entertaining essay by Galvin P. Chow exploring the parallels between the characters of Fight Club and Bill Watterson's classic cartoon series:

Just as Calvin has an imaginary jungle-animal friend named Hobbes, whom everyone else believes to be nothing but a stuffed toy, "Jack" in Fight Club has an imaginary cool-guy friend named Tyler, whom no one but Jack can see. 

In both cases, the entity that began as the ideal companion soon took on a more realistic, three-dimensional quality. In other words, they became real. This is evident in that both Hobbes and Tyler also began to function as scapegoats for their creators. For instance, consider that Calvin often blames broken lamps and other assorted household mischief on Hobbes, and that Jack is inclined to believe that Fight Club and other various anti-society mischief is brought about by Tyler, not himself. Calvin claims Hobbes pounces on him every day after school; Jack believes Tyler beats him up next to 40 kilotons of nitroglycerin in a parking garage—the list goes on and on. The relationships between the two sets of friends are the exact same. Is this mere coincidence?