Month: August 2012

From our ever-vigilant readership:

Rafalca farts at the 1:14 mark of this vid.  Thought that might amuse you.  Maybe the Report writers will notice it and find some significance.

Update from another:

Why does your reader assume it was the HORSE who farted?

Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, 12 pm

A reader writes:

First this post, from Friday: "Unless Obama changes the current dynamic, he's going to lose." Then this one, from yesterday: "The leads in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania are solid – and very dangerous for Romney."

In under a week?  C'mon, you've been hammering away on how conservatism is supposed to be about keeping an even keel, maintaining an established sort of balance.  It's a horse race, but it's also August.  I'd be shocked if Romney doesn't pull ahead nationally at some point (probably post-RNC), or if Obama opens bigger leads. Because it's August 1st.

I know you blog in real time, and we all admire you for it, but hyperventilating on summer polls (not a double entendre) isn't your style.

Yes, I blog in real time and am aware of moodswings.

For a more intense version, I always think of my live-blogging the Palin-Biden debate. For twenty minutes I was losing my shit – before I calmed down, with readers' help. And I still think that the "you didn't build that" dynamic, if Romney succeeds in turning the race into a debate over that, does make Romney a favorite in an economically depressed period. But the last week's data do show a marginally improving Obama position in the electoral college. I can only say I try to balance any one poll with a look at all of them. And I try to keep the emotional roller-coaster of an election campaign a little less melodramatic. But, hey. I care about this election and what it means for America. I'm going to have some bouts of excessive optimism and some moments of deep gloom. It's just who I am. There are other more detached voices out there, if you prefer them.

For a more soothing horse race, here's Rafalca in her Olympic debut.

Jon Stewart's skewering is priceless.

Noticing a rhetorical shift against military spending in the latest Obama ad (screenshot above), Will Saletan crunches the numbers and concludes that the American public is pretty fine with Pentagon cuts:

For six years, the percentage of Gallup respondents who think we spend too much on defense has outpaced the percentage who think we spend too little. Since 2008, the percentage who are very satisfied with the nation’s military strength has increased from 30 to 35, the percentage who are dissatisfied has shrunk from 30 to 23, and the percentage who say our national defense isn’t strong enough has plunged from 47 to 32—a two-decade low.

Again, Romney's position – that the world is more dangerous than during the Cold War and requires ever greater militarization – is simply out of tune with both reality and public sentiment. His personality should not be the deciding factor in this election. His delusional, wingnut, reality-free, mathematically challenged policy proposals should. A reader writes:

If there's a single dynamic in the upcoming election that's unappreciated, it's that the Democrats have for the first time in living memory taken control of the Commander-in-Chief aspect of governance.

And it's not just Obama's leadership as President, but also Panetta's role first at CIA and now at the Defense Department.  This has been a club that Republicans abused Democrats with for decades, but they no longer control the "strong defense" brand.  (The rhetoric, yes, but not the brand.) It's one reason why you see hyperfocused commentators like Chuck Todd hyperventilate that Obama should be behind given the state of the economy, as if terrorism and defense simply cannot factors into his level of support.  Despite all the chest-thumping rhetoric, the Republicans are running a moderate Massachusetts governor and Wall Street businessman with no defense or foreign policy experience, or even a familial association to lean on as GWB had.

Nothing like this has happened for 50 years, if not longer.

Historian Tony Perrotet discusses how the ancient Games more closely resembled some combination of Woodstock, Red Light Districts, and cage-fighting than the current Costas/Seacrest vibe:

The combat events on the fourth day were very popular with the rank and file. The wrestling was similar to today's Greco-Roman wrestling. But the boxing was more exotic. Guys pummeled each other to the head using their fists with leather thongs wrapped around them. Body blows were actually forbidden. There were no rounds and no weight restrictions. There are vivid tales of people's faces being pummeled to a bloody pulp. One boxer didn't want to give his opponent the satisfaction of knocking out his teeth, so he swallowed them all.

Meanwhile, prostitutes could make the equivalent of a year's revenue in just five days. But women weren't excluded from competition:

The [women's] games were held at Olympia and dedicated to Zeus's consort Hera. The young women ran in short tunics with their right breast exposed as an homage to the Amazon warrior women, a race of female super warriors that was believed to have cauterized their right breasts so as not to impede their javelin throwing.

Doping was also a thing back then:

Forget anabolic steroids in easy-to-swallow tablets, or EPO in clean syringes. Ancient Olympic dopers got their pre-Games hormone boost from chewing on raw animal testicles.

I prefer mine lightly sauteed.

(Sketch: Olympia in Ancient Greece from the Pierers Universal-Lexikon, 1891.)

Jay nominates Taibbi, whose latest rant is here:

It was riotous, side-splitting comedy last week when Sanford Weill, the onetime head of Citibank, went on CNBC to announce that he thought it was time to break up the big banks. Why this was funny: Through his ambitious (and at the time not yet legal) decision to merge Citibank, Travelers, and Salomon Brothers into one giant wrecking ball of greed, self-dealing and global irresponsibility called Citigroup, Weill more or less single-handedly created the Too-Big-To-Fail problem. You know, the one currently casting that thick, black doomlike shadow over all humanity which, if you look out your window, you can see floating over all our heads this very minute.

Previous Rosen videos here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

Did he really say that the Palestinians are culturally incapable of the kind of entrepreneurialism displayed so magnificently by the Israelis? Joe Klein in the best of his high dudgeon rebuts:

It’s important to distinguish Palestinian political culture from its business and professional culture.

Indeed, Palestinians are widely known, and often disliked, by their Arab brethren for their entrepreneurial ability–as well as for the disproportionate number of professionals, especially doctors and lawyers, in their ranks. Palestinians, including Yasser Arafat’s father, owned the construction companies that built the Gulf States. They dominate the business class in Jordan. And there is good cultural reason for that: Like the Jews, the Palestinians have been a displaced people. Business and, especially, professional skills are portable. They don’t depend so much on land as farming and ranching does.

As I said, Romney would have had a point if referring to recent history in countries like Saudi Arabia or the wider Arab world. It's the combination of poor manners and a little learning that tripped him up. I wonder when the last time was that Romney was personally and aggressively challenged about some platitude he just uttered. A long time ago, one suspects. Someone needs to get in there and sharpen him up.

Meanwhile, just for an exclamation point, Jared Diamond sticks the boot in.

In some ways, this year is the culmination of a long, failed experiment based on the notion that cutting taxes increases growth and makes up for the lost revenue. Didn’t happen; was never going to happen, even though lower tax rates are obviously better than higher ones for growth, if you can afford them. I favor the lowest and simplest tax rates compatible with a balanced budget. That’s called conservatism. I do not favor the lowest and most complex tax system regardless of its budgetary impact. That’s Republicanism.

The long-term consequence of this unconservative Republicanism is we have no lee-way and no margin of error in stimulating the economy after a financial crash. The Bush-Cheney GOP spent all the money and left us with the worst recession since the 1930s. The only way the Bush tax cuts were passed at all was on condition of their expiration if they did not work as promised. They didn’t. The only issue at hand right now therefore is how to fix the long-term imbalances the Reagan era created, the Clinton era began to fix, and the Bush-Cheney era turned into farce. Doing that in a global slowdown is all the trickier. But there seems little doubt to me that the months after this election may be the most significant fiscally since the 1980s. If our election debate were about that, it would concentrate minds wonderfully.

To that effect, Jonathan Masters provides a primer on the fiscal cliff, which Congress just kicked down the road. Jared Bernstein urges us to focus on the payroll tax, as a way to soften the blow:

The tax increases to the middle class can and should be offset by temporary measures like a payroll cut which fade once the economy is back on track.  In fact, since middle class families pay much more in payroll than in income taxes, this is actually a better economic deal for them.  Recent CBO data reveal that in 2009: a) among households that pay both income and payroll taxes, you have to get to the 90th percentile until they pay more income tax than payroll tax, and b) middle income families spent 1% of their income on federal income taxes and 8% on payroll taxes….

William Gale wants to play chicken with those tax cuts:

“Going over the cliff would give lawmakers both the opportunity to enact a budget deal because they would have more revenues and less spending already in the baseline…,” says Gale…. “What I would like to see us do is combine a temporary fiscal stimulus with the idea that we go over the fiscal cliff and let the Bush tax cuts expire.”

It’s too risky an option in these times, I’d say. But cautiously. A lot depends on the balance of political forces after November. Mark Thoma worries about the eventual showdown:

The Republican Party will not tolerate any action that puts its long-run goal of lower taxes and a smaller government at risk, and this makes it impossible to form a coalition with Democrats to oppose harmful austerity and instead put temporary fiscal policies in place that could promote a faster recovery.

Unless a big loss this fall “breaks the fever” – which is why I’m hoping for (if not expecting) a bigger night for Obama and the Dems than the polls indicate. The fundamental problem right now is that one party is unhinged. The more we can do to keep them in the margins the likelier we are to come to some sane compromise. Speaking of which, Michael Hiltzik beats up on Simpson-Bowles:

According to some estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the plan’s sample cuts in the tax deductions wouldn’t replace the revenue lost to its proposed reductions in marginal tax rates.

But that can easily be fixed in the negotiation. The broad contours of Bowles-Simpson are what matters – especially its Pentagon-cutting. Joe Weisenthal notes that the current drop-off in federal spending is already doing damage:

Government spending isn’t growing like crazy. It’s shrinking. And it’s hurting the economy. Ben Casselman and Conor Dougherty at the WSJ (via Ben White) have a great look at how cuts in federal spending are hampering the recovery…. [And] Deutsche Bank’s usually bullish economist Joe LaVorgna is quoted as saying: “It’s unbelievable how much the economy is getting hurt already by the sharp drop in federal spending.”

Brad DeLong is gloomy about long-term unemployment:

The current balance of probabilities is that two years from now, the North Atlantic’s principal labor-market failures will not be demand-side market failures that could be easily remedied by more aggressive policies to boost economic activity and employment. Rather, they will be structural market failures of participation that are not amenable to any straightforward and easily implemented cure.

No sign of help from the Fed, which released its latest policy statement yesterday.

(Photo by Zach Klein)

As American politicians focus their energy on Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day, the Vietnamese government is strongly considering legalizing same-sex marriage, which would make it the first country in Asia to do so. Le Quang Binh sizes up the situation:

[F]or the time being, the government is not considering same-sex marriage but the legal consequences of same-sex couples…. It is good because the government is consulting different ministries, agencies and NGOs. [Le's think tank] the Institute for Studies of Society, Economy and Environment (iSEE) has been invited to present on LGBT communities and same-sex relationships to the drafting team. The [Ministry of Justice] is also interested in meeting and consulting LGBT community along the drafting process.

A less drab development: Vietnam is having its first pride parade this weekend, in Hanoi.