Author: Andrew Sullivan

by David Frum

Ezra Klein highlights this chart from the Brookings Institution showing that at present rates of job growth it will take years to "close the jobs gap." Brookings explains:

The "job gap" underlying these numbers is daunting. In recent months, on this blog, we described the job gap — the number of jobs it would take to return to employment levels from before the Great Recession, while also accounting for the 125,000 people who enter the labor force in a typical month. After today's employment numbers, the job gap stands at almost 11.3 million jobs.

How long will it take to erase this gap? If future job growth continues at a rate of roughly 208,000 jobs per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year for job creation in the 2000s, it would take 136 months (more than 11 years). In a more optimistic scenario, with 321,000 jobs created per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year in the 1990s, it would take over 57 months (almost 5 years).

But here's a crucial fact that Brookings omits: that 125,000 per month increase in the US labor force is not a law of nature. In fact, during the Bush years, more than half the growth in the US labor force was due to the arrival of immigrant labor. 

Immigrants now make up some 15% of the US labor force. They are concentrated in the less skilled portion of the labor force and in industries hardest hit, especially construction.

 If immigration levels were curtailed, the job gap would be a lot smaller. And if illegal immigrants returned home, rather than being put on a "path to citizenship," the problem of putting the unemployed back to work would be smaller and easier. 

Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 4 pm

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I’ve noticed the posts about ‘non-monogamy’ with passing interest. Folks are too hung-up on sex, but that’s nothing new. I’ll relate my experience to illustrate behaviors that may be more common than many believe. And I’m curious to know whether other readers might have similar stories.

I’m a ‘straight’ male. When I married my wife many years ago, she was aware of a long-standing relationship I had with another man. (So, does that make me straight or maybe bisexual? Just to clarify, I am strongly attracted to beautiful women, and generally quite intimidated by the thought of sex with most men.) Rather than disapprove, she was intrigued and has always accepted and even encouraged the relationship, to the point where she values my male friend near as much as I do. The understanding and acceptance that she and I reached at an early point in our relationship was an important factor in establishing the trust we needed to agree that marriage was right for the two of us.

As the years have gone by, I’ve heard stories about other men who have started out straight and then began pursuing bisexual, or even exclusively homosexual relationships. At first I wondered how this could happen, but I’ve learned that, for myself, it is completely understandable. Although I still enjoy sex with my wife, it happens less often than in the past. Although sex drives for both of us have waned, her decline has been more obvious, and sex has never been quite as centrally important to her as it has been for me. I suppose I could go look for a trophy wife, but sorry, I’m not that kind of guy – I will never leave my wife, as long as she will have me. Bless her heart.

Today I would say that I prefer sex with my male partner, something that I never imagined in my youth. Although I still find women attractive, I’m pretty sure that my wife is my last female sexual partner. As I look back, I note that when I married, I was immediately cut off from sexual contact with other women. Society militates strongly against adultery, which has probably been good for our marriage. Still, my best friends know about my dual allegiances and understand that they work for the three of us.

So, I’ve achieved something that is quite rare, I think, relationships with two different people that are both quite fulfilling. The key ingredient in both is an understanding between the parties of the kind of support each person can give, and will give in order to survive and thrive in a challenging world. I wish no less for everyone.

by Dave Weigel

My post on Megyn Kelly's one-woman-and-a-network war against the Obama DOJ over the New Black Panthers has inspired some smart criticism, led by David Freddoso.

I am surprised at the apparent lack of self-awareness in Dave’s post. I’m not going to say I haven’t enjoyed his wall-to-wall coverage of the “birther” movement, but tell me: Just how is it different from this? There are superficial differences. For example, surely fewer Americans share the Black Panther ideology than remain muddle-headed about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. But the last time I checked, Orly Taitz hadn’t threatened to kill anyone on camera, tried to scare anyone away from a polling place, or received preferential treatment from Barack Obama’s (or anyone else’s) Department of Justice.

Actually, I dealt with this issue, or tried to, in an earlier post about why not to indulge conspiracy theories about Trig Palin. I don't want to quote myself, but Birtherism is a fairly popular conspiracy theory at this point, advanced at times by popular conservative voices like G. Gordon Liddy and Frank Gaffney, and advanced to convince critics of President Obama that their commander-in-chief is illegitimate. Taitz has represented a soldier who declined to serve under President Obama because he claimed that the commander-in-chief was not a citizen, and both the lawyer and the soldier worked to spread this myth. And we live in a weird media world now, where people can pick a news diet of stuff like Alex Jones and WorldNetDaily, and become certain that the media is hiding the real truth about their president's legitimacy. It's a problem — Mark Levin and Glenn Beck refuse to let "birthers" on their shows for that reason.

To answer Freddoso's last three points:

– The video of the Panthers "threatening to kill" is taken from days before the election, from a documentary about their antics, and the threat is obviously impotent — King Samir Shabazz is just mouthing off. These morons have never actually committed violent acts.

– The scary tape of the Panthers pulling their stupid stunt features voters or volunteers walking freely into the polling place behind them.

– We don't know that the Panthers got "preferential treatment" — this was a "voter intimidation" case where no voter came forward to say he was intimidated.

James Taranto had a smart response, too, although at the end he loses the plot a bit, comparing my use of the term "minstrel show" to New York Times columnist Charles Blow's use of it in describing black entertainers at a tea party.

Weigel's invocation of "minstrelsy" rankles. The headline's reference to "Megyn Kelly's Minstrel Show" seems completely out of place, since neither Kelly nor Powers (nor an unidentified brunette who makes a cameo) is wearing blackface. Now maybe Weigel didn't write the headline and meant only to suggest, as he does in the text, that Shabazz, in the Hannity interview, was acting as a minstrel.

I wrote the headline, and Taranto is right — I was referring to Shabazz. When Fox invites the NBPP on, it's giving viewers the image of clownish angry black men in military outfits and telling them — against all evidence — that they represent some real political or protest force. Michael Moynihan brings up a good comparison in his post on this, pointing out that the Swedish press sometimes spotlights the antics of the Westboro Baptist Church, the despicable people who protest funerals (including the funerals of soldiers), and inform readers that they're more than a fringe group despised by basically everyone in America.

by David Frum

Karl Rove offers an interesting reflection on his White House career in this AM's WSJ. His biggest mistake, he said, was failing to fight back harder against the "Bush lied, people died" slur:

At the time, we in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past. That was wrong and my mistake: I should have insisted to the president that this was a dagger aimed at his administration's heart. What Democrats started seven years ago left us less united as a nation to confront foreign challenges and overcome America's enemies.

I have a different take on what went wrong in the Rove years, published in 2007 in the NY Times.

As a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question. The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center? The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it?

Mr. Rove answered his chosen question by courting carefully selected constituencies with poll-tested promises: tax cuts for traditional conservatives; the No Child Left Behind law for suburban moderates; prescription drugs for anxious seniors; open immigration for Hispanics; faith-based programs for evangelicals and Catholics.

These programs often contradicted each other. How do you cut taxes and also create a big new prescription drug benefit? If the schools are failing to educate the nation’s poor, how does it make sense to expand that population by opening the door to even more low-wage immigration?

Instead of seeking solutions to national problems, “compassionate conservatism” started with slogans and went searching for problems to justify them.

by Patrick Appel

Greenwald's take:

It's worthwhile now and then to take stock of the vast disparity between how we like to think of ourselves and reality.  When a country with Argentina's history and background becomes but the latest country to legally recognize same-sex marriage — largely as the result of a population which demanded it — that disparity becomes quite clear.

by Chris Bodenner

Copyranter:

Hmm. Maybe showing a dancing bikini-hottie engulfed in Photoshoppy flames is not such a prudent move to promote nightlife in such an explode-y city. Just. Sayin'.

by Patrick Appel

Felix Salmon's two cents:

Consider an issue with two possible lines of attack: a cheap behavioral-economics solution, B, and a more expensive and politically-fraught substantive solution, S. Does implementing B make implementing S less likely? If B didn’t exist, would S be more likely to come about? Surely there are cases where the answer to both questions is yes — and where therefore behavioral economics is a bad thing, not a good thing. The ability to cover up issues with a behavioral band-aid is often just a way of doing as little as possible while appearing to tackle the issue at hand.

That said, in a lot of cases S would never happen anyway, and in those cases B is better than nothing.

by Patrick Appel

I'm still trying to make sense of the bill, but I've pasted together some thoughts from around the web in the meantime. James Surowiecki:

The bill has been subject to considerable criticism because it doesn’t break up the country’s biggest banks, with people saying that this leaves our Too Big to Fail policy in place. But while the bill doesn’t do much, if anything, about the “Too Big” part, what it does do, at least in theory, is make it possible for even too-big institutions to fail, by creating a mechanism that will allow the government to, in effect, place failing institutions under conservatorship, and wind them down over time, thereby avoiding both the chaos of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on the one hand, and the need to give troubled banks government-subsidized handouts on the other.

Clive Crook:

The bill leaves multiple regulators with wide discretion across a range of critical issues. The argument over precisely what the new rules will be is barely getting started. Some of the most important questions — such as the amount of capital financial firms will have to set aside — are scarcely even addressed. Again and again, the bill calls for studies to be undertaken. No matter how these open issues are resolved, unintended consequences will come thick and fast. The whole thing is unfinished work with a vengeance. Nonetheless, better this than nothing.

Dave Schuler:

Had the measures in Dodds-Frank been in place in 2007 would it have prevented the financial crisis? Since the crisis seems to have been caused by borrowers taking on excessive debt, lenders taking on excessive risk, and the failure of any of a handful of financial institutions posing unacceptable risk to the entire financial system, the answer would appear to be no. Dodds-Frank does little if anything about any of these matters.

Yglesias:

We’ve tended to focus much more on what’s not in the bill than on what is in the bill. What is in the bill is a consumer protection setup that would be considered a major progressive win as a standalone item. What is in the bill is a “resolution authority” that will let future regulators avoid the bailout-or-crisis dynamic that plagued us in 2008. What is in the bill are regulatory tools that even Simon Johnson likes.

Buttonwood:

So financial reform has passed through Congress. It could have been worse as my colleagues recently discussed. But President Obama must be careful about claiming too much. "The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes. There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts" he said yesterday. The words might come back to haunt him in a few years' time if a Lehman (or AIG) saga repeats itself.

Matt Taibbi:

An analysis by a group called Maplight.org uncovered an interesting fact about the vote. The 38 Senators who opposed the bill in the cloture vote this afternoon received an average of $103,266 in campaign contributions from commercial banks. The 60 Senators who were yea votes took an average of $76,759. Obviously this is just part of the puzzle, but it's worth noting.

Douglas Elliott:

The bill will make us safer although it will not eliminate future financial crises. Periodic crises are an inherent feature of market capitalism, or indeed any economic system run by humans. What it will do is to make these crises less frequent and considerably less damaging to the economy. This safety comes at a cost, though; economic growth is most years is likely to be a bit slower because banking will be modestly more expensive—loans will be a little costlier and a little harder to get. This is a trade-off worth making, because the real benefit will be from avoiding the severe economic damage that comes in crisis years.

Eli Lehrer:

Rep. Barney Frank — the single person who may have had the most to do with the bill’s final form — has blamed many of the greatest financial problems on “non-regulation” rather than “deregulation.”  He’s right about that. A working financial system cannot exist in the absence of law and the bill represents a good faith effort to update an outdated financial regulatory framework. As written, the bill contains good ideas and bad ideas in roughly equal number. It could surely stand improvement; but, if implemented wisely, will correct some of the problems that led to the financial crisis in the first place.  The risks of overcorrection, however, remain real and, whatever happens, the numerous new agencies and rules created under the legislation will need careful, ongoing scrutiny.

Robert Reich:

The American people will continue to have to foot the bill for the mistakes of Wall Street’s biggest banks because the legislation does nothing to diminish the economic and political power of these giants. It does not cap their size. It does not resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated commercial (normal) banking from investment (casino) banking. It does not even link the pay of their traders and top executives to long-term performance. In other words, it does nothing to change their basic structure. And for this reason, it gives them an implicit federal insurance policy against failure unavailable to smaller banks — thereby adding to their economic and political power in the future.

Arnold Kling:

Despite the bill's length, most of the regulations have yet to be written. Inevitably, those rules be written to the specifications of the largest banks, because the large-bank mindset will be the only one present in the room. My first prediction is that the biggest long-term consequence of this legislation will be a significant increase in concentration in the U.S. financial industry. My second prediction is that the financial consumer protection agency will turn out to be the financial incumbent protection agency. It will be captured by legacy financial firms, who will use it to outlaw new competing products as unsafe.

Mike Shedlock:

No doubt quite a few inquiring minds will be wondering how a financial reform bill that failed at 100% of its objectives while accomplishing virtually nothing can possibly be considered a "stunning success".

This is where it pays to consider the crucial point: reasonable expectations.