Month: May 2012

It catches up with you:

The fact is that technocrats at the IMF and elsewhere made it easier for politicians to delay the reckoning by putting together economic programs that didn’t hang together from day one.  With optimistic growth projections, debt dynamics looked a lot better, which in turn made it look like sustainability was around the corner. There is an important lesson here for the next round in Spain. Economists have to do a better and more honest job.  When programs don’t add up, they have to say it loud and clear.

We're all Keynesians during Republican administrations.

— davidfrum (@davidfrum) May 25, 2012

"It was a tough few months at the beginning.  I remember in those early weeks receiving from a friend a copy of the Teddy Roosevelt quote about “the man in the arena.”  You may know the quote.  It starts like this.  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by sweat and blood…” I thought that was a thoughtful gesture from this friend, and then, well, about 10 more people sent me the same quote, and I thought, well…this can’t be good," – Tim Geithner.

Jonathan Bernstein pours cold water on the Maryland poll showing a big uptick in black support for marriage equality:

[I]t’s not exactly that Obama influenced black opinions, would be my guess. It’s that African American voters who really don’t care very much one way or another about the marriage issue — but do consider themselves on Team Democrat — are now aware that marriage equality is the normal position of that team. Or, perhaps, that those who think of themselves (implicitly or explicitly) as Team Black now have a revised view of what that team’s position is. Or, perhaps, people who are on Team Church and Team Democrat now realize that those two are in conflict and they have to choose, while before they were getting only one signal.

John Sides insists that presidents generally can't move public opinion:

Obama’s potential leadership in this case doesn’t suggest presidents have broad persuasive powers.  If Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage did shift the views of some African-Americans, that is still a shift among only a minority of a minority of voters in, as far as we know, a single state.

Scott Lemieux agrees:

[A]ssuming arguendo that Obama’s position-taking has in fact increased support among African-Americans — this represents a fairly unusual political situation, in which 1) a stalwart part of the Democratic base 2) among which Obama is particularly popular has 3) a position that is in tension with much of the rest of the rest of the Democratic coalition 4) on a relatively low-priority issue for most voters 5) on which public opinion has been trending positively (including among African-Americans) anyway. It’s not like this kind of dramatic shift can be replicated in all that many other cases.

Adam Serwer adds:

Another factor here is that I think opposition to same-sex marriage among black Americans is wide, but for the most part not particularly deep. This is why black legislators who support same-sex marriage don't get punished at the polls.

Micah Cohen is wary of over-interpreting the poll:

First, polling has tended to overestimate support for same-sex marriage ballot referendums by about seven percentage points. In addition, the sample sizes for demographic subgroups like African-Americans are small, producing large margins of error. Moreover, voters who are newly converted to a candidate or cause may support only tenuously at first and may be persuaded to revert to their prior position.

Everyone got over their optimism now? Good.

Previous videos from Jim Manzi here, here, here, here, and here. You can buy his book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

The roots of Obama's desire to not let anyone else have pot go deep.

A reader objects to yesterday's Quote for the Day from Ric Grenell:

That quote has to be one of the worst examples of false equivalence that I have ever seen.  Grenell equates people arguing that he should agree with them with people arguing that he should not be associated with them.  "You belong with us" from Democrats and "get away from us you freak" from Republicans are not really two sides of the same coin in any normal way of thinking.

Another reader:

Grenell is correct that many liberal gays criticize Republican gays like him, but to equate their views with those of the far right is dishonest. What power did those liberal gays have over Grenell's resignation? Did Romney cower at the mighty hand of liberal-gay-people-who-were-never-going-to-vote-for-him-anyway? No, he caved to the homophobic right-wing of his party pure and simple. This is now a party that wants gay people purged from ANY place in public life and has the power do so within their own ranks. Somehow Grenell has turned a moment that is truly about the anti-gay bigotry of one party into one that sounds like an endemic problem to all parties. I'm not buying it for a second.

Read here for the Dish's full coverage of the Grenell scandal as it broke.

Tim Cavanaugh responds to his Malkin Award nomination. The most deluded part:

 I’d like to take "soaring inflation" and "moribund economy" together: Sullivan posts two charts, one showing GDP growth averaging flat-or-flattish since 2007, and another showing inflation in every quarter except one. During that period, inflation has been a cumulative 10.97, according to a Koch-funded rightwing hate group called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

I suggest Sullivan take a look at the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Fund reports to get a sense of how much household net worth Americans have lost over those same four years, while the value of their money has been literally decimated. That’s a double-whammy called "stagflation," which like the name of Voldemort I don’t care to pronounce because I remember the original. 

Does he? The inflation chart seen above, from Wikipedia Commons, puts Cavanaugh's inflation claims in historical perspective. Cavanaugh tries to make inflation under Obama sound scary by talking about cumulative inflation but there is nothing particularly alarming about the current inflation rate or the fact that inflation has gone up 10.97 percent total in five years. During real stagflation, in 1980, inflation was 13.5 percent in a single year. Jonathan Bernstein unpacks Cavanaugh's inflation fantasy:

[I]nflation, as Sullivan documents, has been basically flat during the Obama presidency. It's not just Cavanaugh, either, although at least some of the inflation Chicken Littles, such as Tom Coburn, only say that it's just around the corner. Of course, Ron Paul and his gang, along with all the goldbugs, are big on this one. My favorite thing is that there's a whole group of people who think it's clever to call the Fed chair "Zimbabwe Ben." You know, because the three great examples of hyperinflation are Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany, and Bernanke-era US.

Fifty Shades of Grey has sold over 10 million copies in six weeks:

The Grey trilogy, penned by E L James, began life as Twilight fan-fiction detailing the erotic adventures of a certain well-coifed vampire and his human object of affection. After other fans raised concerns over how explicit some of the scenes were, James changed the names of the characters and then reposted the stories with a different title which led to a gigantic book deal which then lead to a gigantic movie deal.

Libraries are being inundated with requests, with thousands of holds for the book. A kink:

A good number of libraries are refusing to order the books, saying that they "violated its no-erotica policy" or "did not meet the standards of the community." The National Coalition Against Censorship's executive director, Joan Bertin, said it was "egregious" for a library to remove a book from its adult section. "There are some possible arguments for trying to keep kids away from certain kinds of content, but in the case of adults, other than the restrictions on obscenity and child pornography, there's simply no excuse," she said.

Sex shops are also feeling the demand, specifically in requests for floggers, restraints and paddles. The main target audience for the book is mothers:

E. L. James, the author of the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy, is a mother and television executive in her forties. …[E]ven though her characters are college-aged, the books have resonated most strongly with James’s contemporaries—mothers, wives, "The View" enthusiasts—women who, if they owned riding crops, would store them in the garage between the skis and mountain bikes. The promise of erotic reading may be the initial draw, but, for many readers, there’s the added fantasy of E. L. James herself—the working mother and fan-fiction writer turned overnight success.

Dan Savage criticizes the book's view of BDSM, namely that it's a result of the main character's disturbing past:

Kink, particularly BDSM, is almost always framed negatively in mainstream literature and films—even when (particularly when!) filmmakers and writers are trying to titillate average (read: non-kinky) audience members. Lazy "artists" can be faulted for this, of course, and they should be faulted. But most filmmakers and writers are aiming for a mass audience, i.e. a mostly non-kinky-to-begin-with audience, and the overwhelming majority of non-kinky filmgoers and readers can't seem to relax and allow themselves to enjoy a good kinky fantasy unless they're told—unless they're reminded over and over again—that this kink shit is crazy and that kinksters are fucked up.

It's kinda pathetic: In order to set aside their anti-kink attitudes and enjoy trash like Fifty Shades the average reader first needs to have her assumptions about kink confirmed—crazy! fucked up!—and only then is she able to get down to the business of furiously masturbating about what she's just read.