Month: November 2012

Yes, but it's mostly limited to parrots. Researchers first tested the famous cockatoo, Snowball, which can be seen dancing here:

Patel took one of the tunes that Snowball was familiar with, a Backstreet Boys song called Everybody, and modified it so that the tempo could be sped up or slowed down from 86 to 130 beats per minute, without altering the song's pitch. The researchers took video recordings of the bird's movements while the songs were playing. After analysing their videos, they found that Snowball's dance steps were synchronized to the music. The parrot had moves, after all.

Was Snowball an oddball, or is dancing widespread elsewhere in the animal kingdom? A second group of researchers ploughed through YouTube in search of data, and wound up with 1,019 uploaded videos that claimed to show non-human animals dancing. After a careful analysis, the researchers were left with evidence of dancing in fifteen species. Fourteen of those were, like Snowball, different kinds of parrot. The fifteenth example was an Asian elephant.

The reason? Parrots, humans, and elephants "are all vocal learners, meaning they can change the composition of the sounds they make, by changing pitch or the order of a song, for example."

(Video: A remix of a mega-popular Youtube by another agile parrot, Frostie)

Wick Allison believes that the GOP has "abandoned the most basic moral value of all: fairness":

We all know that eliminating the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy will not make much of a difference in the deficit ($42 billion a year, by most estimates). But anybody who preaches on that point will find himself talking to an empty auditorium. And if raising taxes on the rich is redistributionist socialism, someone should should have told Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan, whose rates on the rich were 91, 70, and 50 percent.

Millman is in the same ballpark:

The GOP could moderate its stance on social issues, or could switch its position on immigration, or what have you. And these things might help or might hurt – I can see arguments for both sides. But I suspect that, ultimately, those questions are window dressing. the GOP cannot become a governing party again if it doesn’t find an economic message that has some relation to the actual economic situation in the country.

Your tumblr of the day. My favorite is Jennifer Rubin, who actually wrote the following words a week or so before the election:

Four years ago the Republican Party was in danger of losing status as a national party, pundits said. It was too white, too southern and too old. The GOP still has a long way to go with minority voters, but after President’s Obama four years in office the Republican presidential ticket is appealing to women, voters in blue state strongholds and independents… The race remains close, but Obama has presided over the Democratic Party’s shrinkage demographically, politically and geographically. The only question is whether Romney can capi­tal­ize and make it past the 270 electoral vote marker.

So again: what are the actual consequences of either being completely delusional or lying for a living? If you work for the Washington Post (see Krauthammer/Will etc.) there are no consequences at all. You just carry on. Edward Tenner doubts this will ever change:

The inaccuracy of pundits, right and left, should be no surprise. Six years ago, the prizewinning book Expert Political Judgement, by the psychologist Philip E. Tetlock, revealed that the media systematically reward passionate and articulate consistency in experts over less flashy but more holistic approaches.

The best strategy for both political and economic forecasters may not be to weigh all factors, but rather to issue bold statements that will be remembered as genius if confirmed and forgotten if wrong (especially because experienced pundits sometimes show their brilliance best in explaining away their previous errors). Didn't Walter Lippmann, the commentary superstar of the 1930s, believe, on the basis of one 1933 speech, that "Herr Hitler" would pursue revision of the Treaty of Versailles through the peaceful auspices of the League of Nations, calling him "the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people"? The dilemma of experts and pundits is that the kind of firm and controversial statements that the market desires from them are the very sort that are most likely to make them incorrect.

(Screen-shot from the most recent Simpsons)

Chait believes that GOP obstruction has started to weaken:

The bursting of the bubble of unreality enveloping the whole Republican party has given Obama’s victory all that much more shocking force. A couple months before the election, when reporting my article on the post-election economic agenda, I spoke with a high-level Republican staffer in Congress. Two things became clear to me. First, he and his colleagues had done very little thinking about how they would respond to a victorious Obama and his newfound leverage. Second, their fallback position would be to replay the approach they used at the end of 2010, insisting on extending every penny of the Bush tax cuts and assuming Obama would blink.

I suspect that both the jolt of Obama’s victory and the steadfastness of his insistence that he would not extend the tax cuts on income over $250,000 a year has shaken loose some of those assumptions. It’s far, far from certain, and perhaps not even likely, that the Republicans will even cut a deal before January. Even if the Washington party decides to cut its losses and deal with Obama, it will have to reckon with the tea party, the likely revolt of which could easily send Republicans scurrying back to their bunker. Still, at this early date, the basic Republican strategy toward Obama appears to be in flux.

Which is deeply encouraging. If they were attached to debt-reduction rather than partisanship, they would see they have in Obama an almost perfect Democratic president. He does care about the debt and has always said he does. He is prepared to deal on entitlements. He wants bipartisan cred to define the beginning of his second term, rather than gridlock that defined the last two years of his first. The GOP needs to give on the top rate – but then compete with the Dems on loophole reduction for the wealthy as a way to remove the taint they now have of being entirely pro-super-rich. It's an opportunity. But in the past they have never missed a chance to miss one.

Look: he's never running again. Do a deal with him for the sake of the country and your own brand. If not now, when?

(Photo: from the tumbr White People Mourning Romney.)

Noah Feldman considers how SCOTUS might weigh in on federal enforcement efforts in states where cannabis has now been legalized:

In practice, the feds cannot go after small- time growers in any serious way, to say nothing of users. Could they enlist state law enforcement to enforce federal law? The health-care decision says that Congress cannot threaten the withdrawal of major funding, and earlier precedent involving gun control says that the federal government may not commandeer state resources. So any federal effort to make states enforce antidrug laws would be subject to legal challenge.

The upshot is that de facto legalization of marijuana might occur even if the federal government never takes part. There will be no dramatic headline, as there would be for a same-sex marriage decision. But the will of the people will prevail, and the Supreme Court will not stand in the way.

James Surowiecki argues that a decent grand bargain can’t be hammered out before the end of the year:

If Congress and the President were to come up with a grand bargain in such a short time, there’s a good chance that it would be largely a product of the inside-the-Beltway biases of deficit hawks (who tend to dominate the “serious” discussions of budget policy), rather than the long-term interests of the country. And at a time when long-term interest rates are at historic lows, with the U.S. able to borrow money for ten years at less than one per cent, we simply don’t need to rush to come up with a massive debt-reduction plan. Yes, in the long run we need to deal with the debt (which, above all, means dealing with the rising cost of health care). But there’s no reason to let the fiscal cliff force us into policies that Americans don’t actually want.

James Joyner counters this sort of argument:

In theory, it would make sense to kick the can down the road—passing a law extending the Bush tax cuts and avoiding sequestration for six months—to give some breathing room. But the recent history would seem to indicate that we won’t get serious about negotiations until the deadline approaches.

Krugman is on a tear as well. He wants much more debt! The truth is: we hit one fiscal cliff in the summer of 2011, in terms of debt levels that may be cheap now but may well not be cheap later. We punted for a final time – with sequestration as the stick. If we now wriggle past this opportunity, why would anyone believe the US is serious about its long-term fiscal position?