Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Avent has an important follow-up on manufacturing and outsourcing that should be read in full:

This sounds horribly dehumanizing and generally terrible, but it’s how the world got rich — by moving workers from wretched jobs to merely crappy jobs, then kicking them out of the crappy jobs and forcing them to find merely cruddy jobs, then kicking them out of the cruddy jobs and forcing them to find merely unpleasant jobs.

by Chris Bodenner

Is here – and amazing:

by Chris Bodenner

Ta-Nehisi, who has been critical of the NAACP in the past, can't side with me, Weigel, and others exasperated with the group's Tea Party resolution:

Racism tends to attract attention when its flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping–positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gays do not simply want to marry, they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace, they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead change the subject and strawman.

TNC goes on to chronicle such rhetoric from a number of mainstream pundits and politicians embraced by the Tea Party movement. I agree with him that a subtler and perhaps more insidious form of racism has seeped into many of the TPM chapters. But for me the issue is a practical matter; was the NAACP resolution helpful for race relations?  Based on the immediate and inflammatory backlash showcased in the MSM, I think not. 

Perhaps the NAACP could have approached TPM leaders in private first, offering to help with a PR strategy to purge the racist elements of the movement from its core, small government message. That would have been the Obama-esque approach.  But publicly shaming the TPM into doing so doesn't seem smart or pragmatic.

(One minor quibble: TNC correctly notes that I favored the Tea Party over the NAACP based on the news of the day. But my hat tip to the TPM was specifically for its silence on the DOMA ruling. For what it's worth, I called out Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams for his ignorant and hate-filled response to the NAACP the following day.)

by Dave Weigel

Buried in a classic Politico VandeHarris Big-Thinker on how Obama's Democrats are more or less doomed at the polls, we find this:

The liberal blogs cheer the fact that Stan McChrystal’s scalp has been replaced with David Petraeus’s, even though both men are equally hawkish on Afghanistan, but barely clapped for the passage of health care. They treat the firing of a blogger from the Washington Post as an event of historic significance, while largely averting their gaze from the fact that major losses for Democrats in the fall elections would virtually kill hopes for progressive legislation over the next couple years.

First: This doesn't at all describe liberal blog content, does it? I remember fireworks in many colors when health care passed and plenty of knowing commentary on the McChrystal flap, although liberal blogs basically reflect the Democratic base in their fingers-crossed approach to Afghanistan.

Second: Most liberal blogs wrote about my resignation from the Post once, maybe twice. Politico published five articles about my resignation and my work since then — on June 25, June 28, June 29, and (twice) July 9. Politico also analyzed the meaning of the JournoList leak and reported on a disagreement about that leak between Andrew Brietbart and Andrew Sullivan. And it was Politico's excellent Keach Hagey who broke the news that while I was at the Post the Media Research Center was running a blacklist campaign against me. So I disagree with Vandehei and Harris — I think Politico did a good job covering this story.

Via Sargent.

by Patrick Appel

Andrew Gelman checks the political incentives:

I suspect the Obama team knows about the research on the economy and election outcomes, and, more importantly, I think they knew about this in 2009 as well. That’s one reason they did the big stimulus last year, no? To put the economy on a better footing in the 2010 election year. And, according to many economists, the stimulus worked in that regard; in the absence of a stimulus, we might very well be in much worse economic shape (at least in the short term). But does Obama gain much by jump-starting the economy now, in July, 2010? At this point it might take too long for an additional stimulus to make much of a difference. And the last thing Obama wants is for a big improvement to come in 2011! On the contrary, the political logic suggested by the political-business-cycle work of Hibbs, Bartels, and others is to keep things mellow in 2011 and save the boom for 2012. Of course, the Republicans know this too . . .

I'm not sure this holds up to scrutiny. If Obama could create a "big improvement" in 2011, I'm pretty sure he'd do it.

by Dave Weigel

That's Ari Melber's why-didn't-I-think-of-it phrase to describe the ratio of media attention Sarah Palin receives to the supporters inspired by what she does. His test case: the "Mama Grizzlies" video, which spliced audio of her speech to the Susan B. Anthony List with video of her meeting with activists, and inspired coverage unheard of for a YouTube video not starring Osama bin Laden or Chris Crocker.

In the week since it was first posted on Palin’s Facebook page, which boasts over 1.8 million backers, the video has drawn 368,000 views. Yet despite her large following, only 33,000 people watched the video via Facebook, according to YouTube statistics. That means only one out of ten viewers found “Mama Grizzlies” through Palin’s social network — and under 2 percent of her Facebook community watched the video. So who did watch “Mama Grizzlies”? Mostly traditional news readers and Palin detractors. Almost a third of all views came through an article on Yahoo! News, for example, while ratings for the video ran almost two-to-one for “dislike” over “like.”

“The bulk of the views seem to come after it had been covered in the mainstream media,” observes Pete Warden, a social media analyst who has studied Palin’s Facebook strategy. “She is still reaching a lot more people indirectly through the media than through Facebook and Twitter and the other direct channels,” added Warden, a former engineer at Apple.

Yes, even the lowest estimate for how much attention this video got from Palin fans has her drawing in more than, say, the latest Tim Pawlenty joint. But there was one real story in the "Mama Grizzly" launch — Palin, after 18 months of winging it, had brought on some new staff to boost her new media clout. This put her several steps ahead of where she was three months ago and several steps behind where possible 2012 candidates like Pawlenty and Mitt Romney are. Cue: Hours and hours of coverage and analysis.

Gist: Palin is good for copy. She's not the only celebrity that the press invents bogus narratives about to justify its coverage. But maybe a little more sanity about the importance of her every move is in order.

by Chris Bodenner

If you're not familiar with the phrase yet, a primer.

by Dave Weigel

Today's Alvin Greene news — every day, there's Alvin Greene news — concerns a local baseball team taking up the Democratic Senate candidate on his idea of selling miniature figurines of himself to boost South Carolina's economy.

With all the talk earlier this year of a "Mr. Liberty" statue at nearby Patriots Point, the RiverDogs already planned to give away miniature "Mr. Liberty" statues to the first 1,000 fans in attendance Saturday for their minor league baseball game against the Augusta GreenJackets. In January, an Atlanta-based group proposed a male counterpart of the Statue of Liberty to stand guard over Charleston Harbor. The proposal was rejected by Patriots Point officials, and later by North Charleston officials. Reacting to Greene's plans for economic development, the Charleston ballclub has decided to place Mr. Greene's face on these figurines.

At what point did the ballad of Alvin Greene become less of a story and more of a Festival of Fools, with the unemployed candidate playing the Quasimodo role? I think it came after the Democrats, led by Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), dropped their conspiracy theories about Greene being planted somehow by fiendish Republicans. They did so quietly, after the circus had moved on, not wanting to admit that the claims were based on nothing but confusion about why a man with so little money would blow $10,000 on a Senate bid — as if assorted kooks and nobodies didn't do the same thing every four years in order to call themselves "presidential candidates." (At CPAC 2007 I found myself seated once next to Susan Doocey, a perfectly nice woman who informed me that she was running for president, which got everyone else to back away from her. And Ray McKinney, a smart under-the-radar GOP candidate for Congress in Georgia, started in politics by running a stunt 2007 White House bid.)

With Democrats no longer going after Greene, though, the story was over. Why, then, do reporters keep heading to South Carolina to profile the guy? Do they expect him to say something profound, or admit that he lied about how he got on the ballot or… you know, make news? What was the point of the talented Katharine Q. Seelye wasting two hours with Greene in order to get him to make inscrutable comments about Nidal Hassan?

I'm not telling people what to publish. I'm genuinely curious about what the news value is when it comes to Greene — if there's any value other than the one the Weekly World News used to consider when it published photos of BatBoy. Sometimes it feels like there are three quick-bake kinds of candidate reporting — catch the rising star, catch the falling star, and "hey, check out the freak."

by Dave Weigel

Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail pose the question in "Does F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom Deserve to Make a Comeback?"

You can pay for the article, which argues that Hayek was making a doomsday argument about social insurance that, later in life, he backed away from. Or you can read Barkley Rossner's summary of the current thinking here, grappling with the book's newfound Amazon.com domination in the wake of its endorsement from Glenn Beck.

Many observers, perhaps most prominently Paul Samuelson in a bunch of his Principles texts, saw Hayek as promoting a "slippery slope" argument, that any move towards a welfare state by the US or UK or other western democracies, would put them onto "the road to serfdom," which, of course, history has shown to be a bunk argument, even if the tea partiers are now invoking Hayek to repeat it along with Limbaugh and Beck. Hayek himself, with Caldwell agreeing, have argued that this is a misreading of RTS, and that Hayek was really focusing on the dangers of Soviet-style command central planning, with Hayek writing angry letters to Samuelson about this matter.

Whatever Hayek meant, it's best to read "The Road to Serfdom" as a rhetorical exercise that can ground your thinking about the motivation behind socialist policies. It's worst to think of it as a playbook for how this stuff plays out — i.e., passing social insurance leads inexorably to tyranny. And it's easy to whine about Glenn Beck pounding home the wrong lesson by having his viewers buy the book. But let's remember who these viewers are. They already think that modest social insurance of the type a European Christian Democrat party might introduce is going to bring about serfdom. Sending these viewers to a non-crazy (that is, non-Skousen) text is one of the best public services Beck has performed.