Month: August 2013

At some point, if an actual party keeps supporting ever-more-extreme policies and ever-more-harsh rhetoric, it will pay a price in popularity and elections. It’s the kind of price that is not paid in one news cycle – in fact, the news cycle mentality can even keep the show on the road for a while. Every juicy shock-horror Newsmax-style scandal, every breathless call to repeal Obamacare for the umpteenth time, every Obama’s-Worse-Than-Nixon column can gin up page-views and ratings and provide fanatics with a short-term high. But as these incidents accumulate and feed off each other, general impressions are formed by the intermittently interested general public. And they are not good. This is what happens:

The approval rating is now lower than in 1994 before the Gingrich revolution threw all the bums out. Gerrymandering and demographics may make the current 14 percent less vulnerable a rating in terms of the next mid-terms. But the decline from its peak accelerated as the GOP wrestled a super-majority from the Democrats in 2010 and turned national politics into permanent gridlock.

And since the last election, I think there are two dominant public impressions of the GOP and neither of them is good. The first is that the party is not shifting to the center after a historic drubbing in the popular vote for the presidency, House and Senate last fall. In many ways, the GOP seems even less willing to compromise with Obama or the Democrats after the election than before it. A GOP-precipitated debt-ceiling crisis like 2011’s – with devastating consequences for the economy – would cement this narrative in ways that would be hard to overcome for a long time. At some point, the public will want the Congress to be able to legislate something as simple as sustaining the country’s credit rating – and if it doesn’t happen, the blame will almost certainly fall on those whose loudest voices are crying for conflict. So-called “establishment Republicans” know this. But the energy and power in the party belongs to the radicals – especially reliable primary voters – and they want, and have been encouraged to expect, a massive showdown to bring the federal government back to its pre-FDR size.

Those radicals are busy alienating, as this Politico piece highlights, critical Hispanic voters by threatening to kill comprehensive immigration reform in its Senate crib, many moderate women by their amped-up obsession with anti-abortion measures in the states, African-Americans by bald-faced and tone-deaf voter suppression efforts, and gays and their families by opposing every single civil right we seek – from marriage equality to protection from workplace discrimination.

The second impression is related to this. It is that the GOP is hopelessly fractured and divided and rudderless – as well as extremist.

Listening to the tone of Chris Christie’s recent remarks – and his dismissive contempt for everyone in the GOP but him – shows how far the Republicans have strayed from the 11th Commandment of the Gipper. They hear Christie insisting that he “will do anything I can to win”. Then they hear one of the most influential of the new crazies, Mark Levin, say: “I will do everything I can to make sure Christie is not the nominee”, and the impression they get is of a party in open conflict with itself.

In just the last week, we have heard Newt Gingrich say that the Republican healthcare alternatives to Obamacare are non-existent Reince Priebus offer this new beaut about Mitt Romney – only last year predicted as the future president:

Using the word ‘self-deportation’ — it’s a horrific comment to make. I don’t think it has anything to do with our party. When someone makes those comments, obviously, it’s racist it hurts us. [major correction from Business Insider here]

The differences between Rand Paul and Chris Christie on foreign policy are as deep as have ever existed in a single national party, as resurgent libertarianism meets a neocon establishment that hasn’t even begun to rethink its own worldview after the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan and torture. And there is no unifying figure or viable establishment honcho to guide the party through these very choppy waters. The last president or vice-president would usually exert that kind of influence, but George W. Bush is a name that cannot be uttered (for good reasons) and Dick Cheney, far from being a calming figure, has become even more unhinged and unreconstructed in his extremism. And so Boehner sums up this bewildered moment on the right: a leader who cannot even control his own Congressional party – cannot even pass its own budget! – and appears as an entirely passive observer of spiraling narratives which he cannot control.

The right will keep telling itself that it can win power by going even further to the right and that a majority of Americans would prefer them in power to Obama, if push came to shove. They have shown that they can talk themselves into anything – even an imminent Romney landslide as late as election night! But that is part of the problem too. They have a media-industrial complex that has a vested interest in pandering to conservative paranoia and extremism, rather than moderating it. Putting Limbaugh and Hannity on the primary debates panel would simply increase the epistemic closure.

Something will have to give this fall. My money is on Obama losing less badly than the GOP. Which could make politics next year entirely different from today.

(Image of Alexis Diaz‘s work via Colossal)

George Dvorsky reviews the hotly contested body of research on the effect of birth order on our personalities:

One particularly controversial area of birth order studies is the ongoing debate about intelligence. Firstborns consistently rank higher on intelligence tests.

The going theory is that they get more attention and resources from parents. Indeed, Robert Zajonc says that firstborn children are almost exclusively exposed to adult language, whereas laterborn children experience the less mature, childish speech of their older siblings. This may subsequently explain why firstborns tend to score higher on tests of verbal ability. As for non-firstborns, their older sibling(s) frequently assume the role of parents, answering their questions and offering perspectives, albeit less capably.

Birth order may also have a bearing on our sexuality:

[P]sychologists found that we’re more likely to form long-term platonic and romantic relationships with other people of the same birth order — an effect the researchers say cannot be explained by other factors, such as family size. Studies have also shown that sexual orientation correlates with a man’s number of older brothers. And in fact, each additional older brother increases the odds of homosexuality by about 33%.

(Photo via Awkward Family Photos)

Does he remember what he wrote yesterday?

Update from a dissenting reader:

In his August 15 posting “The Good Web”, Krugman states, “we are living in a golden age of economic discourse”, and he lauds “the amount of good stuff — stuff delivered in real time, on blogs open to anyone who wants to read rather than in the pages of economics journals with a few thousand readers.”  Krugman’s sole point is availability: good economic discourse is available online and free “to anyone who wants to read” it.  Krugman did not say that the public had absorbed the good economic discourse, that politicians based their public statements on it or that watchdogs like the quality press and PoliFact called politicians to account for making false and misleading statements on fiscal and economic issues.  All Krugman said is that good economic discourse is more widely available than ever. Period.

Krugman’s August 16 “Moment of Truthiness” column cites a Google Consumer Survey on the question “How do you think that the federal government’s yearly budget deficit has changed since January 2010?”  In an August 13 posting Krugman cited a CBO graph showing that the annual federal deficit has dropped from 9% to 4% of GDP so the correct answer is “decreased a lot” but only 11.8% of people chose that answer.  The wildly wrong answer “increased a lot” was given by 39.5% and the nearly-as-bad answers “increased a little” (12.3%) and “stayed about the same” (24.7%).  This means that three-quarters of the American electorate is operating under a gross misapprehension about the direction that the federal deficit is moving.

Krugman goes on in his August 16 column to state that average voters “are not going to sit down with CBO reports” – making the distinction between good economic discourse being available online and it being actually absorbed by the public – and that “they rely on what they hear from authority figures . . . much of what they hear is misleading or outright false.”  Krugman points out that Eric Cantor said on Fox News on August 4, 2013 that the U.S. has a “growing deficit” and that “PoliFact rated this flatly false statement ‘half true.’”  A link on Krugman’s August 13 post to a CBO report shows that the federal deficit fell from over $1 trillion to $642 billion between FY 2012 and FY 2013 so to call the deficit “growing” is indisputably incorrect.

I recognized that “Krugman’s Own Moment of Truthiness” links to and relies on an Xpostfactoid post.  But the title you gave your posting and your brief comment, “Does he remember what he wrote yesterday?” convey a confidence that Krugman has contradicted himself that borders on scorn.  Yet your confidence was misplaced.  Krugman had not contradicted himself in the least.   There is no  contradiction between:

(i) good economic discourse being more widely available than ever because of the internet; and

(ii) three-quarters of the American electorate holding a grossly erroneous understanding about the direction in which the federal deficit is moving, politicians making flatly false statements about the deficit and watchdogs like PoliFact rating the falsehoods half-true.  Technology makes good economic discourse available even though the standard of behaviour among politicians and watchdogs is very low.

I hope you re-read Krugman’s August 15 posting and his August 16 column and then give some fair-minded second thought to whether you ought to have accused Krugman of “truthiness.”

Krugman’s August 16 column did contain a small error.  It referred to Cantor as the third-ranking, not second-ranking, House Republican but by this morning the New York Times had posted a correction at the bottom of the column.  Those are the standards that prevail in the best sections of the old-style media.  You inhabit the best section of the new media.  If you come to agree that Paul Krugman did not exhibit any truthiness August 15-16 I hope you will hold yourself to the standards which the Times applies to itself.

Barton Gellman reports that the NSA breaks its privacy rules thousands of times annually. The headline had me aghast – but the actual details? Not so much. The privacy rules seem to have been violated because of technical, not human, reasons. Mistaking the phone code “20” for “202” (Egypt vs DC) is not a sign of anyone’s deliberate abuse of the law. But it does emphatically reveal the risks and potential abuse involved in this massive collection of data. And it does show that this behemoth has slipped past any meaningful oversight. The lesson Marc Tracy draws from this latest, damning detail of the NSA program’s inherent threat to privacy:

There is a valuable, vital debate to be had over how much the federal government, in its intelligence programs, ought to be permitted to violate Americans’ privacy in an effort to protect Americans from a dangerous world that includes people who want to kill Americans. There are many different places where the important red lines can be drawn in this debate. It is a debate strewn with well-intentioned, conscientious people who would draw those lines at very different places. Let’s even be generous and stipulate that the question of whether the statutorily provided oversight of these programs belongs, as well, to that debate.

The terrifying thing is that we are not having that debate.

As these documents are the latest things to demonstrate, the various overseers as well as the public do not have access to the information that even the current rules assert they should have. That is how I can state with certainty that we are not having that vital debate: We do not have the means to have that debate with any kind of authority; therefore, no matter how much we discuss these issues, we are not having that debate.

Ezra Klein adds:

In a companion story today, the chief judge of the U.S. surveillance courts made clear how much he doesn’t know, telling the Washington Post that “The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court. The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”

This is the reality of the NSA spying programs: Aside from Snowden’s leaks, we only know what the government is telling us. Of course, that’s always the case with intelligence operations. What’s scarier is that the oversight bodies only know what the government is telling them, too.

Friedersdorf calls for a new Church Committee:

Note that the 2,776 incidents of illegal surveillance don’t mean that just 2,766 people had their rights violated — rather, in just a single one of those 2,776 incidents, 3,000 people had their rights violated. As the story notes, “There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.” And that is another reason that an intrusive Congressional investigation into these practices is urgently needed.

In an excerpt from his new book The End of Victory Culture, Tom Engelhardt delves into the history of G.I. Joe:

Joe was the brainstorm of a toy developer named Stanley Weston, who was convinced that boys secretly played with Barbie and deserved their own doll. Having loved toy soldiers as a child, he chose a military theme as the most acceptable for a boy’s doll and took his idea to Hassenfeld Brothers (later renamed Hasbro), a toy company then best known for producing Mr. Potato Head. … Merrill Hassenfeld, one of the two brothers running the company, called on an old friend, Major General Leonard Holland, head of the Rhode Island National Guard, who offered access to weaponry, uniforms, and gear in order to design a thoroughly accurate military figure. Joe was also given a special “grip,” an opposable thumb and forefinger, all the better to grasp those realistic machine guns and bazookas, and he was built with 21 movable parts so that boys could finally put war into motion.

Hassenfeld Brothers confounded the givens of the toy business by selling $16.9 million worth of Joes and equipment in Joe’s first year on the market, and after that things only got better. In this way was a warrior Adam created from Eve’s plastic rib, a tough guy with his own outfits and accessories, whom you could dress, undress, and take to bed – or tent down with, anyway.

But none of this could be said. It was taboo at Hasbro to call Joe a doll. Instead, the company dubbed him a “poseable action figure for boys,” and the name “action figure” stuck to every war-fighting toy to follow. So Barbie and Joe, hard breasts and soft bullets, the exaggerated bombshell and the touchy-feely scar-faced warrior, came to represent the shaky gender stories of America at decade’s end, where a secret history of events was slowly sinking to the level of childhood.

Meg Sense captions the above photo:

GI Joe Fuzzy head Land Adventurer w/ Kung Fu Grip.

My ex-step-father used to have this doll (yeah yeah action figure), the original version w/ talking. My brother and I really loved that thing. I found out they re-produced it in 2006 and have been trying to find one for the last year or so, that doesn’t cost me a ton. It’s a repro after all.