Brendan Nyhan

Pat Buchanan’s favorite Democrat isn’t who you would expect:

Favorite Democrat: I like Congressman Dennis Kucinich. He’s running for president. He’s a very feisty guy. He’s a purist. I don’t think he’s going anywhere, but I tend to like true believers.

On reflection, though, it makes sense — they’re both anti-trade and anti-war extremists who are seen as extremists within their parties.

During an appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show yesterday, Rudy Giuliani attacked Hillary Clinton and MoveOn.org for their criticism of General Petraeus and suggested that such criticism “should not be allowed” (MP3 audio).

For most of the interview, Giuliani characterized Clinton’s mild statement to Petraeus that “the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief” as some sort of vitriolic personal attack that is unacceptable during wartime. (Rudy, of course, never engages in vitriolic rhetoric.) He also agreed with Hannity that there has been “an orchestrated campaign of slander against a war hero.”

But the interview took a more disturbing turn later, when Giuliani’s rhetoric slid into an explicit attack on free speech (9:30 in the interview):

This is being done purely for political campaign strategy. It’s a calculated political campaign strategy. You should not be allowed to malign someone’s reputation unfairly just because you think it’s good for your campaign.

Does Giuliani — who has a troubling history on free speech issues — really believe that Hillary Clinton and MoveOn.org “should not be allowed” to criticize Petraeus? Voters deserve to know.

Update 9/14 9:24 AM: Giuliani ran an ad attacking Clinton and MoveOn.org in today’s New York Times.

Annoyingly, Think Progress has a post up headlined “DNI McConnell: I Lied To The Senate” that states “McConnell unapologetically acknowledged he lied to the Senate.” (Matthew Yglesias also accuses McConnell of “lying to Congress.”) Their proof? A statement (PDF) in which McConnell contradicted his previous testimony and clarifies that “information contributing to the recent [terror arrests in Germany] was not collected under authorities provided by the Protect America Act.” While McConnell should have gotten it right the first time, we just can’t know if he “lied” or just made a mistake. Have you ever testified under oath for hours on the Hill?

The Atlantic’s James Fallows objects to CNN’s use of “Al Qaeda” to refer to the insurgents there. I also heard NPR and the BBC describe an Al Qaeda in Iraq attack as the work of “Al Qaeda” today on the radio. It’s a seriously misleading phrase to use.

The problem is that the administration spin tactic of lumping all insurgents together as “Al Qaeda” lines up with the media’s desire for a convenient shorthand. Even the generally left-leaning staff at NPR and the BBC need a quick way to refer to insurgents that listeners will understand. Few journalists (a) understand that Al Qaeda in Iraq is a small portion of the insurgency and only loosely affiliated with the Al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11 and (b) want to explain this each time AQI comes up. As a result, the White House shorthand tends to win.

I’m sad to report that Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor here at Duke, lost the deanship at the new UC-Irvine law school due to political pressure:

In a showdown over academic freedom, a prominent legal scholar said Wednesday that the University of California, Irvine’s chancellor had succumbed to conservative political pressure in rescinding his contract to head the university’s new law school, a charge the chancellor vehemently denied.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a well-known liberal expert on constitutional law, said he had signed a contract Sept. 4, only to be told Tuesday by Chancellor Michael V. Drake that he was voiding their deal because Chemerinsky was too liberal and the university had underestimated “conservatives out to get me.”

Later Wednesday, however, Drake said there had been no outside pressure and that he had decided to reject Chemerinsky, now of Duke University and formerly of the University of Southern California, because he felt the law professor’s commentaries were “polarizing” and would not serve the interests of California’s first new public law school in 40 years.

I’m particularly disappointed because I was a teaching assistant for Chemerinsky’s undergraduate constitutional law class here at Duke and I count myself among his admirers. First, despite being very busy, he teaches the undergraduate class out of the goodness of his heart. He’s about the nicest person I’ve ever met. And contrary to at least one claim I’ve seen online, he is a fantastic teacher who was extremely fair to all points of view. I never heard anything about his personal opinions in any of my interactions with him.

The good news, however, is that some conservative academics are standing with Chemerinsky in this capitulation to outside political forces:

News of Drake’s decision quickly came made its way through academic and legal circles nationally where it came under criticism from liberals and conservatives scholars who said Chemerinsky was being unfairly penalized.

“It seems late in the day to notice to Erwin Chemerinsky is a prominent liberal,” said John Jeffries, University of Virginia Law School dean. “That’s been true for as long as I’ve known him. It’s rather like discovering that Wilt Chamberlain was tall. How could you not know?”

…Legal academics said Chemerinsky’s sacking could make it difficult for UCI to attract a top-flight dean, students and faculty.

Douglas Kmiec, a prominent conservative constitutional law professor at Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, called the development “a tremendous setback for UC Irvine. It is a profound mistake in my judgment to have obtained the services of one of the most respected, most talented teachers of the Constitution in the United States and to turn him away on the specious ground that he is too liberal or too progressive. That is a betrayal of everything a law school should stand for.”

Glenn Reynolds, among others, shares these concerns.

A profile of the Berkeley economist Raj Chetty in The American includes this unfortunate passage, which has to be amusing to non-economists (via Tyler Cowen):

In a study entitled “Consumption Commitments and Risk Preferences,” published this year in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Chetty and Berkeley colleague Adam Szeidl contest the popular belief among economists that unemployment insurance is too generous. George Akerlof, who also teaches at Berkeley and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, describes Chetty’s insight in the study as revolutionary. “He had a new way of looking at the problems of the unemployed,” Akerlof says. “Raj emphasized that they find it very difficult to meet their prior commitments. For example, they must pay their rent or their mortgage, and these commitments very much add to the difficulties of being unemployed. Economists were just not thinking of that until Raj came up with it. This is a very big innovation in the theory of unemployment.”

Economists didn’t realize it was hard for unemployed people to pay their housing costs? It sounds bizarre, but constructing mathematical models without actually, say, talking to unemployed people can lead to crude and incomplete theories.

Regardless of how you feel about the war, can’t we all agree that General Petraeus has a terrible incentive problem? The Army culture dictates against saying you can’t accomplish your mission, and no general wants to be remembered as the person who lost the war. As a result, his incentive is to tout our “progress” rather than answering the real question, which is whether the expected utility of staying in Iraq going forward is greater than the expected utility of withdrawing. And on top of all that, Petraeus allegedly wants to run for president in the future. It’s no wonder the American people weren’t confident that he would give an objective report.

Economists out there — how could we have created better incentives? The example I’m thinking about is collaborative divorce, which attempts to eliminate the perverse incentives of divorce lawyers, who make more money if divorces turn ugly and go to court. (I actually heard about this on This American Life.) In collaborative divorce, the lawyer who represents you in the negotiation process is actually prevented from representing you in court. Thus, their incentive is to resolve problems rather than worsening them.

Along those lines, should Petraeus have had to resign after delivering his report? Should we tie future bonuses or promotion to the eventual outcome? Or what?

In a TNR Online debate with Jon Chait over Chait’s The Big Con, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist trots out the bizarre argument that a progressive tax system is equivalent to discrimination based on race and sexual orientation:

In the 1950s it was considered by too many acceptable for the state to discriminate against gays and African Americans. Now it is not. Back in those bad old days it was considered politically acceptable to target “the rich” and treat them differently than others. We are slowly moving away from tolerating discrimination based on economics just as we now reject discrimination based on race or sexual orientation. The drive for a single-rate, flat-rate income tax is the moral equivalent of the 1960s civil rights movement which rejected different laws for whites and blacks. Everyone should be equal before the law. The state must treat us without discrimination.

South Africa was a bad place when they discriminated by race. East Germany was not an improvement with its discrimination by economic class. Soviet Socialism targeting landowners/Kulaks and National Socialism targeting Jews and Gypsies were both wrong. Idi Amin went after the Asians; both a race and merchant class in Uganda.

George Wallace and Strom Thurmond recanted. Someday those who would promote hatred and discrimination based on income, wealth, or property ownership will do so also. We are making progress but it does discomfort those who were so used to their prejudices being recognized in law.

As the ownership society grows and deepens … we are all Kulaks now.

This linkage is strikingly similar to the arguments made by the Heritage Foundation’s Daniel Mitchell. Here’s what I wrote about Mitchell for Spinsanity back in 2002:

In an Op-Ed in the Washington Times this week, Mitchell condemns the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case (which ruled that slaves who escaped to free states were still considered the property of their previous owners) and then attempts to connect the case with a proposed change in corporate tax policy, writing that “some U.S. companies soon may be treated in a similar manner” to slaves under Dred Scott due to a bill in Congress that would prevent U.S. corporations from re-chartering in countries with “better tax laws,” such as Bermuda. “The politicians who support this are acting as if these companies belong to the government,” he writes…

Last year, in an interview with the New Republic’s Anand Giridharadas, Mitchell similarly compared tax evasion with the civil rights movement, saying that he could not condemn a family that “deposits their assets offshore in the face of a confiscatory tax like the death tax, any more than I would condemn Rosa Parks for sitting in the front of that bus.”

I don’t think this tactic is going to take off like, say, the “death tax.” In particular, would any politician dare make these kinds of comparisons to an African American audience?

The print version of the New York Times that is delivered to me at home featured a story on the fight against an invasive fish called the northern pike today. It seemed innocuous enough until an official was quoted referring to the current plan to eliminate the fish as a “final solution” — a phrase previously used by Nazis to refer to the Holocaust (text via Nexis):

But like Captain Ahab or perhaps Wile E. Coyote, the state has not let a little adversity stop it. On Monday, more than 500 fish and game personnel began what one official called a “final solution,” a $16 million effort to rid the lake of pike, the most expensive ever undertaken against an “invasive species” in California.

Yikes. How did that language get into print? Someone must have caught on, because the online version of the story drops the quote:

But like Captain Ahab or perhaps Wile E. Coyote, the state has not let a little adversity stop it. On Monday, more than 500 fish and game personnel began a last-ditch, $16 million effort to rid the lake of pike, the most expensive ever undertaken against an “invasive species” in California.

However, there’s no disclosure of a change. I’m glad the Times realized that the language was inflammatory, but how about some transparency?

Via The Atlantic’s Primary Sources section, this is pretty creative:

An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization

Peter T. Leeson
George Mason University – Department of Economics

Abstract:
This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. I argue that pirates devised two institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances that crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order. Remarkably, pirates adopted both of these institutions before the United States or England. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.