Month: November 2014

“Call It The Stupidity Of The American Voter”

This video of Obamacare architect Jon Gruber is going viral:

Money quote:

The bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If [CBO] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money — it would not have passed … Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.

Gruber has apologized for the remarks. The White House is distancing itself while Republicans are talking about making Gruber testify. Suderman feels the video “validates much of what critics have said about the health care law, and the tactics used to pass it, for years”:

For one thing, it is an explicit admission that the law was designed in such a way to avoid a CBO score that would have tanked the bill. Basically, the Democrats who wrote the bill knowingly gamed the CBO process.

It’s also an admission that the law’s authors understood that one of the effects of the bill would be to make healthy people pay for the sick, but declined to say this for fear that it would kill the bill’s chances. In other words, the law’s supporters believed the public would not like some of the bill’s consequences, and knowingly attempted to hide those consequences from the public.

Most importantly, however, it is an admission that Gruber thinks it’s acceptable to deceive people if he believes that’s the only way to achieve his policy preference.

Philip Klein goes further:

Gruber, in a moment of candor, acknowledged what has always been true about Obamacare and liberalism — that the masses have to be tricked into ceding control to those who know what’s best for them.

But Tyler Cowen is uninterested “in pushing through the mud on this one”:

It’s a healthy world where academics can speak their minds at conferences and the like without their words becoming political weapons in a bigger fight.  Or how about blogs?: do we want a world where no former advisor can write honestly about the policies of an administration?  I’ve disagreed with Gruber from the beginning on health care policy and I thought his ObamaCare comic book did the economics profession — and himself — a disservice.  But I’m simply not very interested in his proclamations on tape, which as far as I can tell are mostly correct albeit overly cynical.  (If anything he is overrating the American voter — most people weren’t even paying close enough attention to be tricked.)

Neil Irwin is likewise underwhelmed by the comments:

Mr. Gruber was exposing something sordid yet completely commonplace about how Congress makes policy of all types: Legislators frequently game policy to fit the sometimes arbitrary conventions by which the Congressional Budget Office evaluates laws and the public debates them. … This kind of gamesmanship is very much a bipartisan affair. President George W. Bush’s expansion of Medicare in 2003 was carefully designed so that its costs were backloaded, rising sharply just after its 10-year mark. Estimating costs in the 10-year window is an (arbitrary) convention for C.B.O. scoring of pending legislation. The design of the law made it seem less costly than it was expected to be over a longer time period.

Drum weighs in:

First, he noted that it was important to make sure the mandate wasn’t scored as a tax by the CBO. Indeed it was, and this was a topic of frequent discussion while the bill was being debated. We can all argue about whether this was an example of the CBO scoring process being gamed, but it has nothing to do with the American voter. Rather, it has everything to do with the American congressman, who’s afraid to vote for anything unless it comes packaged with a nice, neat bow bearing an arbitrary, predetermined price tag.

As for risk-rated subsidies, I don’t even know what Gruber is talking about here. Of course healthy people pay in and sick people get money. It’s health insurance. That’s how it works. Once again, this was a common topic of discussion while the bill was being debated—in fact, one that opponents of the bill talked about constantly. They complained endlessly that healthy young people would pay relatively higher rates than they deserved, while older, sicker people would get a relative break on their premiums. This was no big secret, but the bill passed anyway.

Beutler notes that “nearly everyone who’s attacking Gruber as if he were a White House political employee or a Democratic senator is simultaneously trying to require the Congressional Budget Office to say that tax cuts pay for themselves”:

The people who brought you the phony arithmetic of the Bush tax cuts and Medicare Part D and the self-financing Iraq war are upset about the ACA, which is genuinely fiscally sound. By any reasonable standard, ACA respected budgetary constraints much better than most other laws. That the authors took pains to meet concrete budgetary goals actually underscores the point that they took CBO, and budgetary questions in general, very seriously. If they didn’t take CBO seriously, they could’ve just ignored it, or fired the messenger. That’s what the George W. Bush administration threatened to do when the chief Medicare actuary prepared to say the Part D drug benefit would cost more than the White House was letting on.

And Chait’s take:

“Stupidity” is unfair. Ignorance is a more accurate term. Very few people understand economics and public policy. This is especially true of Obamacare — most Americans are unaware of the law’s basic functions or even whether their state is participating.

Since people know so little about public policy in general and health-care policy in particular, they tend to have incoherent views. In health care and other areas, they want to enjoy generous benefits while paying low taxes and don’t know enough details to reconcile those irreconcilable preferences. Gruber’s error here is that, by describing this as “stupidity” rather than a “lack of knowledge,” he moves from lamenting an unfortunate problem both parties must work around to condescending to the public in an unattractive way.

Huckabee 2016?

The former governor and current Fox News pundit may be gearing up for another presidential run. Luke Brinker takes him seriously:

While it’s early yet, public polling places Huckabee near the top of the GOP’s field; according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average, he’s in a statistical tie for first place with Rand Paul, Bush, Christie and Paul Ryan. Huckabee certainly stands an excellent chance of once again winning the Iowa caucuses, where RCP gives him a 6.2 point lead over Ryan, his nearest competitor. What’s more, his net favorability rating is the highest among the Republican pack, although a surprising number of voters remain unfamiliar with him.

Douthat deduces that a Huckabee campaign “is probably good news for Team Rand, since Huck is more likely to take votes (at least initially) from potential Paul rivals like Cruz than he is from Paul himself”:

As for Huckabee’s own odds of winning the nomination … well, they’re probably slightly better than the press and the political class assumes, because he’s a gifted politician who appeals the most important G.O.P. constituency, has a Fox News fan base and substantial gubernatorial experience, and polls as well as anyone at the moment.

But speaking as a longtime Huckenfreude afficianado, I think it’s fair to say that his moment (if there was one) came and went in 2012, a year when the party’s populists cycled through every possible anti-Romney candidate before finally settling on Rick Santorum and then losing (but surprisingly narrowly) with him. In those circumstances, what you might call Huckabee’s “Teavangelical” appeal and genuine populist background probably would have given him a better shot than Santorum or Gingrich (or Cain or Bachmann or help me I’m having flashbacks) at defeating Romney, who was, let’s face it, pretty much his ideal foil. But in 2016, with a much stronger field that might actually feature a little more populist substance and fewer corporate raider gazillionaire candidates, it’s much harder to see how Huckabee would expand beyond his big-in-Iowa base. At best, he’d be an important spoiler; at worst, his voters would ultimately jump to Cruz or Carson or even Rubio before the first ballot was even cast.

Larison dreads a Huckabee run:

On foreign policy, Huckabee has always been a hawk, but he went from occasionally saying somewhat sensible things during the 2008 campaign to being a predictable, awful hard-liner since then. In fact, he always was a hard-liner on some issues. His views on Israel and Palestine are so unreasonable that his presence in the 2016 field could only make the Republican debate on foreign policy much worse than it already will be. Especially if Santorum also chooses to run again, a Huckabee campaign would appear to add nothing to the debate that won’t already be there.

Waldman sizes up the growing GOP field:

Huck will certainly stand out as the friendliest, happiest candidate in a phalanx of grim and angry contenders. And there sure will be a lot of them. The RNC recently sent out a straw poll to its supporters and included a remarkable 32 candidates. Many of them won’t actually be running (I’m doubtful that “Ready For Pawlenty” is gaining steam), but I count no fewer than 15 Republicans whom I’d say were more likely than not to run. They’ll all be playing “Who’s the most conservative?” while bludgeoning each other desperately, and with Huckabee in the race, there’ll be no shortage of folksy aphorisms. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Lab-Grown Ghosts

Joshua Krisch flags new research into the neurological basis of a ghostly presence:

Feeling of Presence, or FoP, is the disconcerting notion that someone else is hovering nearby, walking alongside you or even touching you. It’s the stuff of ghost stories, but also a real symptom of several neurologic conditions, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists know so little about the underlying causes of FoP that long-term treatments and cures remain illusive.

Now, researchers are chipping away at the neurobiology behind that uncanny feeling. In a paper published November 6 in Current Biology, a team of scientists described how they used a custom-built robot to induce an eerie Feeling of Presence in healthy participants. Their findings confirm that sensorimotor conflict, a neurologic imbalance between what the mind perceives and what the body feels, lies at the root of some FoP illusions.

Rebecca Morelle discusses the study’s methodology:

To investigate, the researchers scanned the brains of 12 people with neurological disorders, who had reported experiencing a ghostly presence. They found that all of these patients had some kind of damage in the parts of the brain associated with self-awareness, movement and the body’s position in space.

In further tests, the scientists turned to 48 healthy volunteers, who had not previously experienced the paranormal, and devised an experiment to alter the neural signals in these regions of the brain. They blindfolded the participants, and asked them to manipulate a robot with their hands. As they did this, another robot traced these exact movements on the volunteers’ backs. When the movements at the front and back of the volunteer’s body took place at exactly the same time, they reported nothing strange. But when there was a delay between the timing of the movements, one third of the participants reported feeling that there was a ghostly presence in the room, and some reported feeling up to four apparitions were there. Two of the participants found the sensation so strange, they asked for the experiments to stop.

The robot is demonstrated in the above video. Morelle adds:

The researchers say that these strange interactions with the robot are temporarily changing brain function in the regions associated with self-awareness and perception of the body’s position. The team believes when people sense a ghostly presence, the brain is getting confused: it’s miscalculating the body’s position and identifying it as belonging to someone else. Dr Rognini said: “Our brain possesses several representations of our body in space. Under normal conditions, it is able to assemble a unified self-perception of the self from these representations. But when the system malfunctions because of disease – or, in this case, a robot – this can sometimes create a second representation of one’s own body, which is no longer perceived as ‘me’ but as someone else, a ‘presence.'”

Julie Beck notes, “Aside from just being cool and spooky, this study could have real implications for how science understands schizophrenia”:

It’s possible that the signal confusion Rognini describes could account for some symptoms schizophrenia patients experience—like feeling as though they’re being controlled by an alien presence, for example. That’s why the researchers’ next steps are to get schizophrenia patients to try out the robot, and see if the effect it produces feels similar to their symptoms.

It also reveals something interesting about consciousness in general – that it’s not necessarily a given that our brains always understand what our bodies are doing, or even that they’re our bodies. “The brain has multiple representations of the body,” Rognini says, “and these are usually integrated together and give us a unitary experience of the body and self in space and time. We show that when there is some damage to the brain or some trick played by a robot, a second representation of our body arises in a way that gets perceived by us but not as our body but as the presence of another human being. Physically this presence is already hidden inside our minds.”

Getting To The Head Of The Class

Carl Chancellor and Richard D. Kahlenberg argue that when it comes to education, economic segregation is worse than racial segregation:

African American children benefited from desegregation, researchers found, not because there was a benefit associated with being in classrooms with white students per se, but because white students, on average, came from more economically and educationally advantaged backgrounds. All-black schools that included the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and teachers alongside the offspring of less-advantaged parents often provided excellent educational environments because the economic, not racial, mix drives academic strength.

The solution, they say, is school choice:

School officials today emphasize public school choice – magnet schools and charter schools – to accomplish integration, having long rejected the idea of compulsory busing that gave families no say in the matter. In Hartford, Connecticut, for example, magnet schools with special themes or pedagogical approaches often have long waiting lists of white middle-class suburban families who are seeking a strong, integrated environment.

While many charter schools further segregate students, some are consciously seeking to bring students of different economic and racial groups together. The Denver School of Science and Technology, for example, uses a lottery weighted by income or geography to ensure a healthy economic mix in its seven middle schools and high schools. …

Today, more than eighty school districts, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Raleigh, North Carolina, to Champaign, Illinois, promote socioeconomic integration, almost always relying on choice. These districts educate more than four million students nationally.

But as Sara Neufeld notes, charter schools around the country are struggling with a separate problem – teacher turnover:

Since the “no excuses” movement began in the mid-1990s, its schools developed a reputation for attracting teachers who are young, idealistic and often white, available to families around the clock until they leave after a few years. Sometimes they’re ready to have children of their own or move on to more lucrative career prospects; other times they’re just tired. The phenomenon has been blasted for depriving students of stable adult relationships and creating mistrust in minority neighborhoods when white teachers serving black and Hispanic students come and go. So now the focus is sustainability.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Happy reunited 25th, Berlin:

A reader comments on our WAM/Twitter coverage:

I should clarify that I have disagreed with you many, many times before, but I have still enjoyed your writing and thinking on whatever issue. However, on this topic, I’ve found your approach very disheartening. Especially as you have frequently acknowledged your “outsider” status in this topic (video game culture, Twitter discourse between men and women, women in formerly “male” spaces, the objectification of women, etc.), I’ve found it disappointing that you wouldn’t attempt at least some more empathy and observation before jumping into the middle of the fray. I think this is a very important cultural discussion happening right now, and I feel you’re not treating it with the nuance and respect it deserves. I appreciate the reply, and thank you for all of your great writing and advocacy for many great causes over the years.

I never expect readers to agree or even sympathize with what I have to say, which is why almost everyone who comes up to me on the street begins any words of praise with “I don’t agree with everything you have to say, but …” It’s also why the Dish has been publishing lots of reader input and other voices challenging me – edited and curated by my colleagues. For example, there’s the long tough dissent posted today. Another from a woman on my gamergate blogging can be found here. Many more smart readers here, here, here. Our airing of other bloggers’ views different from mine can be found here, here, here and here. Much of it is extremely nuanced, and it’s the overall mix you should judge the Dish on – not my peculiar emphases or blind spots.

Still, I’m not budging from my basic position: first against harassment, threats, and stalking, but secondly also against the attempt to police the discourse in the name of social justice. Sticks and stones and all that …

Some light relief: I’m loving the thread on literary hangovers; and this parody of the Hollaback video is a hoot. Two heavy hitters: my dissent against a war we cannot win in a place we need to leave; and the growing threat of an increasingly reckless Putin.

The two most popular posts of the day were both about Twitter’s recourse to a “gender justice” group to nominate tweeters for suspension.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 22 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here.

See you in the morning.

What Washington Refuses To Admit

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well. The president himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.

These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again. To protect its own self-regard, Washington’s elite is prepared to send young Americans to fight in a war they cannot win and indeed have already lost. You see the blinding myopia elsewhere: Washington’s refusal to release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture merely proves that it cannot face the fact that some of the elite are war criminals tout simple, and that these horrific war crimes have changed America’s role in the world.

What infuriated me about the decision to re-start the Iraq War last August – by a president explicitly elected not to do any such thing – was its arrogance, its smugness, and its contempt for what this country, and especially its armed forces, went through for so many long years of quagmire and failure. Obama and his aides revealed that their commitment to realism and not to intervene in Syria could be up-ended on a dime – and a war initiated without any debate in Congress, let alone a war authorization. They actually believed they had the right to re-start the Iraq War – glibly tell us it’s no big deal – tell us about it afterwards, and then ramp up the numbers of combat forces on the ground to early Vietnam levels.

This is not just a Republican fixation. It’s a function of the hegemony reflexively sought by liberal internationalists as well. Just listen to Jon Stewart calling Samantha Power’s smug bluff last night:

 

It was one of Stewart’s best interviews in a long while. One telling moment comes when Stewart asks Power why, if the threat from ISIS is “existential”, the regional powers most threatened by it cannot take it on themselves. She had no answer – because there is none. The US is intervening – despite clear evidence that it can do no real good – simply to make sure that ISIS doesn’t actually take over the country and thereby make president Obama look bad. But the IS was never likely to take over Kurdistan or the Shiite areas of Iraq, without an almighty struggle. And our elevating ISIS into a global brand has only intensified its recruitment and appeal. We responded, in other words, in the worst way possible and for the worst reasons possible: without the force to alter the underlying dynamic, without a breakthrough in multi-sectarian governance in Baghdad, without the regional powers taking the lead, without any exit plan, and all to protect the president from being blamed for “losing Iraq” – even though “Iraq” was lost almost as soon as it was occupied in 2003.

My point is this: how can you behave this way after what so many service-members endured for so long? How can you simply re-start a war you were elected to end and for which you have no feasible means to achieve victory?

The reason, I fear, is that the leadership in both parties cannot help themselves when they have a big shiny military and see something they don’t like happening in the world. If they can actually decide to intervene in a civil war to suppress an insurgency they couldn’t fully defeat even with 100,000 troops in the country, without any direct threat to national security, they can do anything. Worse, our political culture asks no more of them. The Congress doesn’t want to take a stand, the public just wants beheadings-induced panic satiated by a pliant president (who is then blamed anyway), and the voices that need to be heard – the voices of those who fought and lost so much in Iraq – are largely absent.

That’s why I found this op-ed in yesterday’s NYT so refreshing. A former lieutenant general in Iraq reminds us of the facts McCain and Obama both want to deny:

The surge in Iraq did not “win” anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans’ unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate. Like a handful of aspirin gobbled by a fevered patient, the surge cooled the symptoms. But the underlying disease didn’t go away. The remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents we battled for more than eight years simply re-emerged this year as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

To go back in and try to do again with no combat troops what we could not do with 100,000 is a definition of madness brought on by pride. It is to restart the entire war all over again. It makes no sense – except as political cover. I was chatting recently with an officer who served two tours of duty in Iraq, based in Mosul. I asked him how he felt about ISIS taking over a city he had risked his life to save. And I can’t forget his response (I paraphrase): “Anyone who was over there knew right then that as soon as we left, all this shit would happen again. I’m not surprised. The grunts on the ground knew this, and saw this, but the military leadership can’t admit their own failure and the troops cannot speak out because it’s seen as an insult to those who died. And so we keep making the same fucking mistakes over and over again.”

At what point will we listen to those men and women willing to tell the ugly, painful truth about our recent past – and follow the logical conclusion? When will Washington actually admit its catastrophic errors and crimes of the last decade – and try to reform its own compulsive-interventionist habits to reflect reality rather than myth? Not yet, it appears, not yet. Washington cannot bear very much reality.

(Photo: U.S. Army soldiers of the D-CO 2/325 AIR 82nd Airborne Division during a dismounted movement to conduct early morning raids on homes in Baghdad, Iraq on April 26, 2007. The soldiers are part of the United States military surge as they try to help control the violence plagued city. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

Is John Oliver A Journalist? Ctd

It seems quite obvious to me that he is: an entertaining journalist. Matt Zoller Seitz nods vigorously:

Last Week is doing what media watchdogs (including the Peabody Awards) keep saying that The Daily Show does — practicing real journalism in comedy form — but it’s doing it better, and in a simpler, yet more ambitious, ultimately more useful way. If Stewart’s show is doing what might be called a reported feature, augmenting opinions with facts, Oliver’s show is doing something closer to pure reporting, or what the era of web journalism calls an “explainer,” often without a hook, or the barest wisp of a hook. …

If Oliver’s show hadn’t come along, it seems possible that The Daily Show and its time-slot partner (come January, it’ll be former Daily Show correspondent Larry Wilmore’s The Minority Report) would have become televisual furniture, another thing that’s just mysteriously Still On, and that the habituated audience keeps watching without ever feeling dissatisfied.

Oliver’s show threw a wrench into that possible outcome by taking core bits that once were the sole province of The Daily Show (the punny/smart-assed headlines, the “gotcha” deconstructions of political chicanery, the “Does this person I am interviewing know I am putting them on?” segments, the occasionally surreal imagery) and putting them at the service of education. I’ve watched every installment of Last Week since its debut. Every time, I’ve come away feeling that I’ve truly learned something. In an increasingly degraded journalistic landscape, that’s an astonishing achievement.

Recent Dish on the show here and here.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“Joe Biden is what you see. You know, he’s genuine. Yes, he’s prone to gaffes publicly, and he’ll admit that. He’s very self-deprecating like that. And I’m certainly not one who agrees with Joe Biden on all things—we probably disagree more than we agree—but from a human and relationship standpoint, the guy’s awesome,” – Eric Cantor.

Yes, he probably had to lose his seat before he could say that, but still …

Senseless Style, Ctd

A reader shakes his head at Nathan Heller’s harsh appraisal of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style :

Heller seems entrapped in conventional but uninformed assumptions about language that don’t really endure being questioned well. Language is not a fixed, absolute thing.  In a way, language is the ultimate free-market commodity.  It changes in accordance with the whims and interests of its speakers, heeding no regulation. (Just observe the futile efforts of L’Académie française to tell the French how to speak French.) School-taught standard languages and rules such as those that Professor Pinker takes issue with try to freeze a language at an arbitrary point in time, or even a mishmash of several arbitrary points, that has no practical reason to be taken as authority. English went from “Oþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto,” to “And it came to passe in those dayes, that there went out a decree from Cesar Augustus,” in about 500 years. Even that later translation looks a little funny to a modern reader, and it the gulf would seem greater if we heard if spoken using early-17th-century pronunciation.

Another takes issue with Robert Lane Greene’s criticism of Heller:

It doesn’t follow from simply saying “logic” and “consistency” mean different things to different to people that therefore there is no correct meaning of “logic” or “consistency” independent of anyone’s feelings about it.  To admit a pluralist logic is to forfeit the ability to make any arguments for or against anything that rise above sheer expression of will.

Another reader snarks on a related post about writing style:

Ben Myers may be “laboring to achieve good short sentences,” but with sentences like this, he’s got plenty left to do:

At any rate, whatever the source of this malaise, the symptoms are evident in the tendency of students to obfuscate simple ideas through a complexification of syntax, a multiplication of imprecise verbs instead of the selection of the one strong verb, and a deliberate substitution of polysyllabic words whose meanings are often vague and slippery for smaller ones whose meanings are plain and solid.

A more cynical reader:

Mr. Myers advocates simplicity and clarity in writing without demonstrating any of these qualities in his own prose, which he duly acknowledges in his self-effacing close. That said, may I suggest that simplicity, clarity, and explanation in writing mean very little without simplicity, clarity, and understanding in thought?

Most education today is driven by a market mentality. Why wouldn’t teachers want to help students learn to “obfuscate simple ideas through a complexication of syntax,” when that’s exactly what will gain one access to any of the white-collar professions? The entrance to the door of the legal, medical, political, financial, and scholastic professions could easily read: “Enter those who have mastered the implementation of  a multiplication of imprecise verbs instead of the selection of the one strong verb, and a deliberate substitution of polysyllabic words whose meanings are often vague and slippery for smaller ones whose meanings are plain and solid.”  It seems Mr. Meyers is unaware of his own egalitarian impulses, as he speaks of students class-based shame, but has not reached the clarity in his on mind before putting pen to paper.