Fordham rallies from 9-1 down to tie game. With score tied at 9 in the bottom of the 8th and bases loaded, Chris Walker (#4) puts Fordham ahead with game-winning hit. The baserunner at first, Brian Kownacki, scores by leaping over Iona catcher James Beck, and landing on home plate with a handstand, to put Fordham ahead 12-9, which was the final score.
1. Obama’s Accomplishments. Jonathan Bernstein explains how Obama has gotten so many of his legislative goals accomplished despite the GOP’s constant obstructionism: By loading up the major bills with many other smaller items. In fact, according to PolitiFact, Obama has accomplished almost a third of his campaign promises if compromises count (and a fifth if they don’t).
2. Facebook v. Google. Ian Schafer in the Advertising Age has a smart take on Facebook’s recent challenge to Google and how Facebook is trying to reorganize the web.
3. Epistemic Closure. Julian Sanchez follows up on his starting post on the epistemic closure of the right wing. Every single link he provides in the article is worth following as the conversation he started extended across many people and was full of insights all around.
4. Obama’s Diplomatic Brand. Marc Ambinder has an excellent post on “the essence of Obama’s diplomatic brand.” While Ambinder acknowledges it’s too early to assess how effective Obama’s diplomacy will be and has been, he does a good job of describing it — and little wonder it bears little resemblance to the weak, anti-American apologizing that the right sees as Obama’s trademark. Ambinder lists a few qualities, but let me focus on one:
Bush assumed a position of direct strength, not deference, when he met with leaders. Obama has been decidedly deferential, which, in the traditional binary way the media covers foreign policy, allegedly suggests weakness. From Obama’s perspective, deference is both strategic and is demanded by the goals he sets out. Treating countries as equals foists certain obligations upon them. It helps leaders deal with internal politics. Year one, Obama was the star, and wasn’t seen as a heavyweight, even by some allies. Year two is different: he’s charted a course on legacy problems (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Middle East peace), so the world knows where he stands.
5. How Financial Reform is Playing. There was some disagreement around the opinionosphere about how financial reform is “playing.” Initially, there was concern that the Republicans would once again follow their tried and true strategy of: Make up stuff that’s really awful — and pretend the bill is about that. There was concern that the Obama administration didn’t have a plan for this contingency, presuming that Republicans would crack under public pressure. And then, the SEC filed suit against Goldman and Blanche Lincoln (who was expected to water down the bill) adopted the strongest language we’ve seen and the Republicans seem to be breaking ranks over this with Bob Corker critizing McConnell’s lies and Chuck Grassley voting for the bill in committee. Kevin Drum suggests McConnell crossed some line of absurdity:
[I]t turns out there really is a limit to just how baldly you can lie and get away with it…[W]e seem to have reached a limit of some kind, and McConnell crossed it. Maybe we should name this the McConnell Line or something so that we know when future politicians have crossed it.
I tend to think Matt Yglesias is more right when he observed:
This time around, though, it doesn’t seem to be working nearly as well, perhaps because people realize we’ve seen this movie before.
6. Our Long-Term Fiscal Crisis. Jonathan Chait observes what may prove to be a fatal flaw in the political strategy of the GOP on fiscal matters if they authentically do support a smaller government:
Distrust of government makes Americans distrust everything people in governemnt say or do, including cut spending, which — with the exception of a few programs seen to help “others,” like welfare and foreign aid — tends to be wildly unpopular.
Their current strategy has been to provoke a fiscal catastrophe and cut government spending in the aftermath. But Chait suggests that this strategy of starve-the-beast governance may not work. On a related note, William Galston has an astutely even-handed piece describing the fiscal problems we are facing and what the solution must realistically be. He quotes Donald B. Marron in National Affairs who explains an idea that is antithetical to ideological right wingers:
Policymakers should not always assume that a larger government will necessarily translate into weaker economic performance. As few years ago, Peter Lindert—an economist at the University of California, Davis—looked across countries and across time in an effort to answer the question, “Is the welfare state a free lunch?” He found that countries with high levels of government spending did not perform any worse, economically speaking, than countries with low levels of government spending. The result was surprising, given the usual intuition that a larger government would levy higher taxes and engage in more income redistribution—both of which would undermine economic growth.
Lindert found that the reason for this apparent paradox is that countries with large welfare states try to minimize the extent to which government actions undermine the economy. Thus, high-budget nations tend to adopt more efficient tax system—with flatter rates and a greater reliance on consumption taxes—than do countries with lower budget. High-budget countries also adopt more efficient benefits systems—taking care, for example, to minimize the degree to which subsidy programs discourage beneficiaries from working.”
Right wingers rarely acknowledge this even as they oppose measures that would improve the efficiency of government (like the VAT). They simply call it “European-style socialism” and move on with addressing why on the substance more efficient government measures shouldn’t be adopted.
7. Our Problem-Solving Capacity. Stephen Walt has a very long and very, very good post that attempts to balance optimism (global violence is at historic lows!) with some pessimism:
One way to think about the current state of world politics is as a ratio of the number of important problems to be solved and our overall “problem-solving capacity.” When the ratio of “emerging problems” to “problem-solving capacity” rises, challenges pile up faster than we can deal with them and we end up neglecting some important issues and mishandling others. Something of this sort happened during the 1930s, for example, when a fatal combination of global economic depression, aggressive dictatorships, inadequate institutions, declining empires, and incomplete knowledge overwhelmed leaders around the world and led to a devastating world war…
[Today] Washington D.C. has become synonymous with the term “gridlock,” leading the Economist magazine to describe the U.S. political system as “a study in paralysis.” Obama did get a health care reform package through, but it still took an enormous effort to pass a watered-down bill that pandered to insurance companies and other well-funded special interests. Meanwhile, decisive action to address climate change, the persistent U.S. budget deficit, or financial sector reform remain elusive, and it’s going to get a lot tougher if the GOP makes big gains in the 2010 midterms. Nor is it reassuring to realize that the Republican Party seems to be taking its marching orders from two entertainers — Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck — the latter of whom has made it clear that he’s interested in making money and doesn’t really care about public affairs at all…
Nor is this problem confined to the United States. Japan’s ossified political order remains incapable of either decisive action or meaningful reform; the Berlusconi-government in Italy is an exercise inopera bouffe rather than responsible leadership, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s early flurry of reform efforts have stalled and Mexico remains beset by drug-fueled violence and endemic corruption. Britan’s ruling Labor Party is a spent force, but the rival Conservatives do not present a very appealing alternative and may even lose an election that once seemed in the bag. And so on.
There are some countries where decision leadership is not lacking, of course, such as China (at one end of the size scale) and Dubai (at the other). Yet in both these cases, a lack of genuine democratic accountability creates the opposite problem. These government can act quickly and launch (overly?) ambitious long-term plans, but they are also more likely to make big mistakes that are difficult to correct them in time…
In short, what I am suggesting is that our inability to cope with a rising number of global challenges is not due to a lack of knowledge or insufficient resources, but rather to the inability of existingpolitical institutions to address these problems in a timely and appropriate way.
8. Mike Allen. Mark Leibovitch in the New York Times Magazine has an excellent profile of Mike Allen of Politico and how that organization is changing the news business by covering it like some combination of ESPN and Facebook’s feed of data on the activity of your friends. As a character study, it succeeds given Mike Allen’s unique personality — and as a look at the changing media landscape in politics, it succeeds in raising many questions about where we’re headed. Marc Ambinder responds.
[Image by me.]
[digg-reddit-me]Mark Krikorian has a post over at National Review’s The Corner defending the leader of an anti-illegal-immigration group called D.A. King and attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center in general, and specifically for labeling the Dustin Inman Society led by King a group that is spreading bigotry.
Now, King named the group after a clear victim of what he seems to call the “invasion” of “brown people” — a boy named Dustin Inman who was killed in a car crashed by an illegal immigrant. (Because legal residents don’t accidentally kill people in car accidents approximately 100 times a day.) A quick Google search reveals that King uses racialized language and seems uncomfortable with Hispanics — he said he said a pro-immigrant march seemed like some Mexican village — which is why his “first act on a safe return home was to take a shower;” and warned darkly of the “invasion” of the “brown people” and of “parasitic ethnic hustlers” who favored amnesty; and he did at least once apply the “illegal aliens” simply to all the Hispanics in various photos. I mean — that’s just what 5 minutes on Google and a few clicks around his own website show — maybe it represents his body of thought and maybe not.
But what I wanted to comment on was this Mark Krikorian post. But instead, let me just re-post a few portions of it, with all bolding done by me…
Just typing “Southern Poverty Law Center” makes me want to scrape off my shoes…
[T]he SPLC includes such targets (including, I’m proud to say, the Center for Immigration Studies) in lists of those “spreading bigotry,” or whatever,…
This happens all the time, but one example that came to my attention was the Dustin Inman Society, a mainstream (and quite effective) anti-illegal-immigration group in Georgia headed by D.A. King… The point is not whether D.A. is a hater (he’s not — I’m not even sure he’s a restrictionist, since he limits himself to illegal immigration, and I’ve never heard so much as an epithet from him, even in private, let alone any Zionist conspiracies or Trilateral Commissions or even longing for the Lost Cause)…
I’ve rarely heard a better defense of someone than Krikorian’s of King: “I haven’t heard the guy slur blacks or Hispanics as most people I know do! Even in private! Isn’t that incredible! And he doesn’t even long for the good old days when Mexicans were in Mexico and blacks were slaves! Or rail against Jews! The guy’s a saint practically!”
But it all makes you wonder a bit about the crowd that Krikorian hangs out with that these things are exceptional — and proof that someone isn’t a racist. And it certainly goes a long way to demonstrate why the Republican Party won’t be winning the Hispanic vote any time soon.
[Image by MikeSchinkel licensed under Creative Commons.]
What’s happening with financial reform right now is unlike anything that’s happened since I’ve been following American politics. Look at the fundamentals of the issue. This is a matter where a massive industry — one that accounts for close to half of all corporate profits — is adamantly opposed to new regulation. The merits of the issue are so mind-numbingly complex that even economists and policy wonks sound distinctly fuzzy on the details. Throw in a Republican Party that had pursued, with evident political success, a policy of total obstruction. I’d tell you this was a formula either for defeat or a toothless reform.
And yet a substantial reform now appears close to inevitable. It’s not a toothless reform — a set of derivative regulations more hawkish than anybody could have dreamed possible a couple weeks ago just passed through the Agriculture Committee. It’s one of those strange moments when the normal laws of politics have been suspended.
[digg-reddit-me]This is something that really needs to get more attention. William Cohan in the New York Times:
The easiest and most profitable risk-adjusted trade available for the banks is to borrow billions from the Fed — at a cost of around half a percentage point — and then to lend the money back to the U.S. Treasury at yields of around 3 percent, or higher, a moment later. The imbedded profit — of some 2.5 percentage points — is an outright and ongoing gift from American taxpayers to Wall Street.
H/t Ezra Klein.
I also came across this from James Kwak at the Baseline Scenario:
[I]f you see a company that has very high profits over a sustained period, there are two possibilities: either it is benefiting from a non-competitive market (e.g., it is a monopoly), or it is simply exceptional at innovating and staying ahead of the competition for years on end. If you see a whole industry that has sustained high profits, however, the latter explanation cannot hold, and you should immediately suspect a lack of competition.
[T]he thing that we should celebrate is not high profits, but competition. The pursuit of high profits is what motivates competition; but if a whole industry achieves high profits, then what you are seeing is not competition, but its opposite.
[digg-reddit-me]In 2006, thousands viewed this chart on ThisIsIndexed. Then in 2008, thousands viewed the below chart on GraphJam, inspired by the one from ThisIsIndexed and created by a Felix. Over this past weekend, Miss Cellanea posted the graph without linking to the original GraphJam page (but thanking one of the millions of Joe’s in the world). Then came über-blogger Andrew Sullivan, who posted the chart today citing Cellanea. No doubt some millions have now seen it.
My conclusion: Always link to your source. And eventually, good content gets recognized.
[digg-reddit-me]Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein had 2 complementary points in posts yesterday. (Damn you, JournoList!) Yglesias:
…[L]ooking at this chart I think it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Wal-Mart is the last thing we should be worried about. The worrying trend is the domination of the corporate landscape by super-profitable firms in the heavily regulated energy, banking, and telecom sectors.
Yglesias is making a point most commonly associated with libertarians that large firms often use the government — through favorable regulation, tax breaks and incentives, etc. — to increase their profits. For example, increasing the barriers for new firms in the industry and restraining their indirect competitors from direct competition. This follows the well-known principle that any government policy whose costs are diffused and whose benefits are concentrated will be adopted more often than not. Thus highly regulated industries tend to be dominated by a small number of large firms that make very large profits — because thanks to government regulation, there isn’t much competition. However, Ezra Klein observed:
In a competitive market, there’s really no place to make 27 cents on the dollar. Some other firm will come in and offer the same services for 24 cents, and then someone will undercut them at 19 cents, and so it will go until the profit margin narrows. Wal-Mart, for instance, has a profit margin of around 3.5 percent. Ah, capitalism.
Not so in the financial sector, though, which ever since deregulation has been posting higher and higher profit margins.
So, the exception to this trend is Wall Street — where deregulation has lead to higher profits. All of this seems quite intuitively true — both from a libertarian and from a liberal perspective — and even from a liberaltarian one.
The enormous profits taken out of every dollar (as seen in much of the the financial industry) is a demonstration of a lack of competition and thus a poorly functioning market. Of course, Goldman Sachs didn’t manage to make it on the list above — but it had more than double the amount of profit out of every dollar it took in as compared to each of the companies here. Goldman managed to take $0.26 of every dollar they made as profit to their shareholders. (And that includes the massive bonuses given to employees as expenses.) I think I need to see more data though to draw the conclusion that Klein is hinting at — that the deregulation of Wall Street increased it’s profits as a percentage of revenues — while deregulation generally has the opposite effect (as in the case of Wal-Mart).
Annie Lowery drives the point home in analyzing the 1Q results from Wall Street:
This is not quite a picture of a healthy industry. In a competitive marketplace, prices and fees at Wall Street firms should fall and margins should become thinner. On the one hand, Wall Street firms like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs have seen a number of their competitors die in the past two years, and have absorbed business from the failed Lehmans and Bear Sterns of the world. But on the other hand, Wall Street profit margins have remained sky high except for a short blip during the worst of the credit crunch. And, an economist would tell you, such sustained levels of high profitability point to anti-competitive behavior…
[T]he profits point to a lack of competition. That is one thing the Dodd bill — via derivatives regulation — attempts to fix. Right now, Wall Street firms do not bid for big derivatives contracts — they simply quote a price and work over-the-counter. For that reason, derivatives are wildly profitable for the companies. The Dodd bill will force derivatives pricing to become public to the market, driving down margins as companies compete.
There’s a whole lot to unpack within these points about the nature of American capitalism and the government’s role in it.
But one key takeaway seems to be a repudiation of the most ideological take of either the left or right — and an acknowledgment that free markets are not merely what happens when the government is out of the way — but are created and maintained by a complex balancing act in which government regulates and participates. What you end up with is something less than socialism or libertarianism and more like liberalism:
Contemporary liberals reject the doctrinaire distinction between the “market” and the government that animated so much of the conflict in the 20th century. The free market should not be treated as some theoretical utopian ideal or as a perpetually lost state of innocence. And the government is not some evil force which must be reduced until it is of a size that it “could be drowned in a bathtub.” Rather the government and the free market exist together – and in a capitalist republic such as ours, each is dependent on the other. The free market does not exist in a state of nature but must be created by and maintained by the society and the state which provide the values and the rules and other conditions without which a market cannot be free. In other words, a free market is a product of a just government.
Follow-up post here.
[Image by f-l-e-x licensed under Creative Commons.]
[digg-reddit-me]I met 2 members of that vibrant cultural movement pretending to be a political one, the Tea Party, last night.
When I say they were members of the Tea Party, I don’t mean one of those independents discouraged by Obama that Republican operatives always claim is the typical Tea Partier.
I don’t mean a Republican partisan who thinks this is just a good re-branding.
I don’t mean Greg O’Neil.
I mean 2 actual Tea Party wingnuts.
It is rare to see them outside of their home environment (rallies involving racial epithets and mocking those damned people with Parkinson’s disease looking to be coddled) with their identifying characteristics full on display.
However, I was able to positively identify them by cataloguing the following characteristics which can serve as the start of a general checklist of how to identify Tea Party folk (with prominent characteristics in bold):
I have a feeling I know what it’s like to talk to Sarah Palin (but with a Dutch accent — as these people were a rarer breed of Tea Partiers, naturalized citizens from Europe).
Some characteristics I understand to be part of the Tea Party movement that these individuals did not display (perhaps because they weren’t given the chance — I walked away when I was told I wasn’t really American):
So, take this checklist out into the wilds and perhaps you too can positively identify a Tea Partier!
And feel free to add more characteristics in the comments.
* This is a cartoon rather than a graph, so it should be noted it isn’t perfectly accurate — but it visually conveys the point solidly. Reagan, for example, only had 28% tax rate for the final year of his presidency. The average top marginal tax rate under Reagan was 48%.
[Image by JoeBehrSoCal licensed under Creative Commons.]
Ezra Klein explains how financial innovation causes financial crises:
Investors want to make more money with less risk. Someone invents a financial product that appears to make investors more money with less risk — in this case, subprime securities. Demand for this new product explodes. But few understand this new product, and even the people who do understand the new product don’t know how it performs under stress (it’s a new product, after all). At the beginning, this actually helps the product: because its risks aren’t known, they’re ignored, and so it looks like a better deal than it is and sells more of itself than it should.
Then something bad happens. The new product shows its flaws. And precisely because no one really understands it, the market cracks. Investors all run away at once, as they don’t really have the tools to assess the situation. Where lack of knowledge about the product originally drove demand, now it accelerates flight.
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