Brendan Nyhan

DeLay evidence production watch

I'm officially starting a countdown until Tom DeLay backs up the claim that the Democratic leadership is conspiring with Ronnie Earle (reported in the New York Times today), which he conveniently failed to substantiate under questioning from Wolf Blitzer yesterday:

DELAY: Ronnie Earle has been district attorney in Travis County since 1976. In 1976 there were no Republicans -- certainly no Republicans other than governor, and he didn't get elected until '78. There were no Republicans. The fights were between conservative Democrats and liberal Democrats. Ronnie Earle does this to all his political enemies. He did it to conservative Democrats. He did it -- and he does it to Republicans. And particularly in my case, he did it in conjunction and working with the Democrat leadership here in Washington, D.C.

BLITZER: Well, that's an explosive charge you make, that there was some sort of collusion or conspiracy between Ronnie Earle and Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders in the Congress. What evidence, if any, do you have to back that up?

DELAY: It's very good evidence, that they announced this strategy publicly, they put it on their website and this strategy is in their fund-raising letters.

BLITZER: Who specifically -- who announced this?

DELAY: The DCCC, the Democratic Campaign Committee, run by Chairman Rahm Emanuel.

BLITZER: They announced that they were working with Ronnie Earle to get you an indictment?

DELAY: No, they didn't do that.

BLITZER: What evidence is there they consulted with Ronnie Earle, that they talked to him or they had any dealings with him whatsoever?

DELAY: That evidence is coming. But the point is, they announced the strategy, and it's very funny that two weeks ago, when Ronnie Earle said publicly that I was not part of the investigation, that I hadn't been investigated, and then turns around in two days -- over the weekend -- he now is going to indict me. It is quite obvious, because the Democrats announced this strategy. And we all know how this place works. I'm sure they worked closely with Ronnie Earle on this strategy.

BLITZER: When is the evidence going to be made available? You say it's coming. When are you going to make that evidence available?

DELAY: When it's timely.

BLITZER: What does that mean?

DELAY: When it's timely.

BLITZER: All right. Well, we'll have to wait and see for that evidence.

In other news, DeLay later asked Pelosi when she stopped beating her husband.

Update 9/30: Jon Chait does a great job of explaining what DeLay represents in his LA Times today (via Kevin Drum).

Who voted for Roberts?

The Wall Street Journal editorial page breaks down the Roberts confirmation vote:

John Roberts was sworn in yesterday as the 17th Chief Justice of the United States. No surprises there. The confirmation vote was 78-22, with all 55 Republicans, 22 Democrats, and Independent Jim Jeffords voting "aye." He'll take up his gavel on Monday, when the Supreme Court begins its 2005-2006 term.

As a snapshot of the state of the Democratic Party, the vote is instructive. It was mostly a red-blue split. Thirteen Senators from states that went for President Bush in 2004 were pro-Roberts, including the five who are up for re-election next year. As they cast their votes, we expect that Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Robert Byrd (W. Va.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Bill Nelson (Fla.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.) had visions of Tom Daschle dancing in their heads. The former Majority Leader lost his seat last year in part because South Dakotans objected to his obstruction of Mr. Bush's judicial picks.

A very different calculation was apparently on the minds of the party's likely 2008 Presidential hopefuls. The "no" votes included John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, none of whom wanted to alienate the party's energized left-wing base. Even ostensible "moderate" Evan Bayh, of Judge Roberts's home state of Indiana, couldn't bring himself to vote for a native son.

The honorable exception here was Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, a liberal in most matters, but perhaps one who understands that if he ever would become President, he'd prefer to have his nominees treated by Republicans with more than a party-dictated dismissal.

The full roll call is here. Make sure to also see the prediction and analysis of the Roberts vote at Keith Poole's Voteview.com.

Presidential vs. Congressional approval

Harvard's Barry Burden has posted an interesting graphic tracking presidential and Congressional approval during Bush's time as president:

In analyzing the data, he finds that presidential approval influences Congressional approval, but not the reverse. This result is based on only 56 months of data from one presidency, but it's an interesting finding. The most obvious implication, of course, is that the same fundamentals -- the economy and major foreign policy events -- seem to drive both presidential and Congressional approval, a result that's consistent with the findings presented in Erickson, MacKuen and Stimson's The Macro Polity.

Conservative discontent with Bush grows

David Brooks:

Sometimes in my dark moments, I think [George W. Bush] is "The Manchurian Candidate" designed to discredit all the ideas I believe in.

David Frum:

This has been a very bad month for the Bush presidency, maybe the worst to date: Hurricane Katrina, bad news from Iraq and grumbling from within the president’s own party over spending and immigration.... [M]uch of the trouble is the president’s own fault. He chose to appoint Michael Brown to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He chose to spend lavishly on highways and farmers and a new prescription drug benefit at the same time as he was fighting a global war on terror. And of course it is he who remains the final decision-maker on national security....

[A]s one who... still critically supports him, I find the sudden surge of public disenchantment with Mr Bush very difficult to understand. If you were looking for a diligent manager of the office of the presidency, a close student of public policy, a careful balancer of risks and benefits – George W. Bush would never be your man. But is this news?...

In a 2003 book about Mr Bush, I offered this assessment of his personality: Mr Bush is “a good man who is not a weak man. He is impatient, quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and as a result ill-informed... 

Bruce Bartlett:

I testify as someone who is very disenchanted with his party’s fiscal policy since 2001. Unlike the other witnesses, I am less concerned about the deficit per se or about the size of the tax cuts enacted over the last five years. Rather, what really bothers me is the increase in spending and expansion of government that my party has been responsible for.

...Therefore, it bothers me a great deal when Republicans initiate new entitlement programs, massively expand pork-barrel spending, and show the most callous disregard for fiscal integrity. Not too many years ago, Ronald Reagan vetoed a politically popular highway bill because it contained 157 pork-barrel projects. The latest bill contained at least 5,000. Yet President Bush signed this $295 billion bill into law, despite having promised repeatedly to veto a bill larger than $256 billion.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why President Bush seems so incapable of using his veto pen. His father knew how to veto bills. He vetoed 29 of them in his four years in office. But in his first four-plus years, this President Bush has vetoed nothing. He is the first president since John Quincy Adams to serve a full term without vetoing anything.

(via Brad DeLong and Andrew Sullivan)

Update 9/28: Via the Bull Moose, here's National Review in an editorial:

President Bush is in a perilous political state. His slipping poll numbers are partly a result of softening support from his Republican base. If Bush doesn't take decisive steps to try to offset the billions of new Katrina spending, the forecast will be: Danger, more softening ahead. Never in the Bush years has conservative discontent been so high, nor so justified. With a few false moves in the crucial weeks ahead, Bush could see even more of the life-blood squeezed from his presidency.

What is Ezra Klein talking about?

Jacob Weisberg has written an annoying piece about fighting povery in the aftermath of Katrina that is straight out of Slate's "everything you know is wrong!" handbook. Rather than fighting attempts to turn the disaster zone into a conservative utopia of low taxes and weak regulations, Weisberg says that liberals should go along with Bush:

[A]ll of us have a stake in an experiment that tells us whether conservative anti-poverty ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we will all be better for its success. And if it fails, we will have learned something important about how not to fight poverty.

Unfortunately, Ezra Klein's Tapped post responding to Weisberg is an ugly mix of invective and know-nothingism:

[Weisberg's] argument, basically, is that liberals should let conservatives do whatever they wish to New Orleans because America needs to figure out whether Republican solutions to poverty will succeed -- and if they don't, it's because they're scared the conservative plans will work. The people of New Orleans, we can only assume, will not be told they're participating in an economic version of the Tuskegee experiments; we'll just let them get buffeted about out of sheer respect for the scientific method. Testing hypotheses is much more important than a few thousand black folk.

Weisberg, bizarrely, seems to think a liberal unwillingness to make New Orleans into a Grover Norquist fantasyland stems from a fear that it'll work. Au contraire, it stems from a fear that it won't work, and that scores of poor people who just had their lives demolished will now be further punished by a regionally restricted Gilded Age. Liberals do not think this because they are afraid, they think this because they are liberals. If they did not believe conservative solutions would fail, they would be conservatives. And if either group, liberals or conservatives, are so unsure of their policies that they believe antithetical programs should be applied for the experimental value of it, they should really exit the debate with all possible speed -- these are real people we're talking about, they shouldn't be subdivided into control groups and experiment zones.

Klein is of course correct that liberals should not support policies that they believe will fail solely as an experiment. But the rest of his argument is horribly misguided.

First, the comparison to the notorious Tuskegee experiments, in which poor African American men with syphillis were left untreated for years, is absurd. Presumably, conservatives are proposing measures that they believe will help people in the Gulf, not withholding proven medical treatments from people with a disease.

In addition, Klein's argument that "these are real people we're talking about, they shouldn't be subdivided into control groups and experiment zones" is wrong-headed. It's precisely because there are real people involved that we should study what social programs work scientifically, and experiments are by far the best way to do so. For instance, voucher experiments have shown that the gains made by participants are marginal at best. Presumably Klein is glad that we've conducted such tests rather than simply enacting vouchers wholesale.

To be sure, we don't want to conduct experiments that seem likely to make people in the Gulf worse off. But there's no reason we can't carefully test various anti-poverty interventions that seem likely to help, and assess which ones give us the biggest bang for our buck. That's how we can help "real people" most effectively.

Where did Bush's swagger go?

According to the Washington Post, President Bush is "suddenly finds himself struggling to reclaim his swagger":

Most of all, White House aides want to reestablish Bush's swagger -- the projection of competence and confidence in the White House that has carried the administration through tough times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush likes to say his job is to make tough decisions and leave the hand-wringing for historians and pundits. He almost never entertains public doubt, which is part of the White House design to build a more powerful presidency...

He projects this in nonverbal ways as well, the arms-swinging gait of his walk, the glint in his glare, the college boy grin that flashes even in sober moments. Some advisers consider this supreme self-confidence a secret to Bush's success enacting his first-term agenda and winning reelection in a tough political climate. It reinforced Bush's image as a decisive leader, which was an important attribute in an election colored by the threat of terrorism, and helped calm congressional Republicans who disagreed with some of the president's ideas but were won over by the force of his style.

The confidence was contagious, with White House officials and Republicans in Congress as certain as the president himself in what Bush was doing. But over the course of six months, a growing number of Republicans inside and out of the White House have noticed an administration less sure-footed and slower to react to the political environment surrounding them.

I'll tell you where the swagger went -- out the window when Bush's approval ratings hit the low 40s. As I wrote, "Many of the tactics that worked when Bush was at 60 or 70 in the polls are a flop at 38 or 41." From late 2001 to early 2004, Bush could swagger around and everyone, including the media, would eventually fall into line due to his high approval ratings. But now he doesn't scare anyone except Republicans who fear losing their seats in 2006 and 2008.

I believe that much of what happens in Washington is driven by the president's approval ratings, which are -- in turn -- largely driven by the state of the economy or major foreign policy events like 9/11. But instead of looking at those factors, we tell stories about swagger and charisma and political strategies, just as we do when we study presidential races. It's mostly nonsense. Bush could have done almost anything after 9/11 and still had high approval ratings (in fact, he did -- remember the school in Florida?). Bill Clinton would have probably won in 1996 even if Dick Morris hadn't run his famous 1995 outside-the-Beltway ads. Etc. But since the press and the strategists want to believe that they are all powerful, they ignore political scientists and listen to each other instead.

Teaching intelligent design is not a matter of "freedom"

This quote from yesterday's New York Times story on the Dover intelligent design case made me crazy:

For Mrs. Hied, a meter reader, and her husband, Michael, an office manager for a local bus and transport company, the Dover school board's argument - that teaching intelligent design is a free-speech issue - has a strong appeal.

"I think we as Americans, regardless of our beliefs, should be able to freely access information, because people fought and died for our freedoms," Mrs. Hied said over a family dinner last week at their home, where the front door is decorated with a small bell and a plaque proclaiming, "Let Freedom Ring."

Teaching intelligent design in a public school science class is not a matter of "freedom"! You can freely access information all you want, but that doesn't mean that a religious perspective should be taught as science by the government. Why are conservative pundits spreading this stupid argument?

Larry Sabato goes hip hop

The ubiquitous Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia (a political scientist) has released a new article that his staff has incongruously titled "Protect Ya Neck: The 2006 Races for Senate and Governor" -- who knew Sabato was down with the Wu-Tang?

What is Brendan Miniter talking about?

Brendan Miniter, an assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com, makes an absurd claim in a column today:

Republicans were sent to Washington in the 1950s to repeal the New Deal. Voters sent them packing when it became clear they were big spenders. In the 1990s Republicans were sent to Washington to repeal the Great Society. If they too turn out to be big spenders, they can expect a similar fate.

Now, it may be true that conservatives wanted Republicans "to repeal the Great Society," but that was hardly the sentiment of the electorate as a whole, as we learned when the government shutdown backfired on Newt Gingrich and the supposed revolutionaries of the 104th Congress. And while I'm not an expert on 1950s politics, my sense is that the Republicans of the period were largely accomodationists who weren't "sent" to repeal the New Deal either.

Miniter is also peddling a simplistic dichotomy between "big spenders" and repealing the New Deal/Great Society in which those who fail to do the latter must be the former. That's ridiculous, and it's equally ridiculous to suggest that voters are going to punish members of Congress for failing to take us back to the 19th century. There's simply no popular support for rolling back the New Deal or Great Society. That said, however, the GOP is discovering that its big spending ways can be politically damaging, especially when they are seen as corrupt and hypocritical.

WSJ supply side follies vol. XXXVIII

A Wall Street Journal editorial today (subscription required) again suggests that tax cuts increase revenue:

Our primary concern with the Katrina spend-fest is that it puts the economy at risk by putting pro-growth tax cuts in harm's way. If the 2003 capital gains, dividend and income tax rate cuts are cancelled, as virtually the entirety of the Democratic Party is clamoring for, we get the most destructive of all fiscal storms: a continued federal spending buildup -- expenditures are already up 34% under President Bush in five years -- slower economic growth, and a smaller future tax base to finance federal spending promises.

This is nonsense on two levels. We know that deficits drive up interest rates and at least partly counteract the effects of tax cuts. In addition, having a larger "future tax base" isn't particularly helpful for financing "federal spending promises" because keeping the Bush tax cuts in place will (a) increase the debt burden on future generations and (b) reduce the amount of revenue that could be generated from the future tax base without a tax increase.

The trick here is to obscure the underlying supply side fallacies by using more indirect language. But the point is the same, so let me put it more clearly. Almost every serious economist (including former Bush CEA chair Greg Mankiw) agrees that tax cuts don't increase growth enough to pay for themselves. This means that tax cuts reduce revenue both now and in the future relative to what would have happened if they had not been enacted. And that means that the federal government has less ability to fulfill its spending promises both now and in the future.

(See my previous posts on the Journal for more.)

Mini-hiatus almost over

A brief note: I was busy taking comprehensive exams last week, and then I camped out for basketball tickets over the weekend, so obviously the blog has been neglected. I'm playing catchup now, but I'll be back in full force tomorrow. Thanks for being patient.

Another cheap shot from Eric Alterman

In a classic Alterman move, he's taken another vague cheap shot at me that misconstrues what I actually wrote:

A certain young blogosphere language cop recently took issue not only with my use of irony on the blog but also with my implication that the mainstream media have consistently treated President Bush as far more popular with Americans than he really is.

He then quotes from a poll showing President Bush's low approval ratings and some silly analysis from an MSNBC anchor about how Bush's response to Katrina is "going to be a win" as if these disproved my claims.

Once again, Alterman is being disingenuous. The first post he's referring to pointed out that, on June 7, he wrote:

George W. Bush's approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton's was on the day he was impeached. Dear media, that means you gotta stop referring to him as a "popular president," and no less important, stop treating him like one.

But when I checked Nexis, I found that Chris Matthews was the only major media figure who had described Bush as a "popular president" since his second inauguration. I certainly never said that Bush was popular -- indeed, I wrote in the same post that Bush's popularity is a "myth" and linked to a post making that point back in March.

Then, on August 30, I pointed out that Alterman had made another direct claim about the press:

Will Bush become the most unpopular president in the history of Gallup Polling? Here. And will the mainstream media continue to refer to him as "well-liked" by the country?

So I checked Nexis and couldn't find even a single example of anyone in the press using the phrase "well-liked" to describe President Bush during the previous six months. But I never denied that the press exaggerated Bush's popularity -- in fact, I agreed with Alterman's premise: "The media does tend to overestimate Bush's popularity, but that doesn't mean you can just put phrases in quotes and claim people in the media are repeating them."

However, since Alterman doesn't have the courage to name me or link to my posts, his readers will never know any of this.

(See my previous posts on Alterman, especially this one, for more.)

Update 8/26: Apparently I'm also "whiney," "self-pitying" and don't know what irony is:

One additional irony of this story --note to whiney, self-pitying literalist language cops, look that up -- is that because the refs worked the Times "liberalism" so effectively, in my opinion, they won themselves a completely baseless and self-defeating endorsement of the awful and incompetent George Pataki in his last election.

Conservative utopia, part II

After their free market dreams didn't quite work out in post-Saddam Iraq, conservatives are turning to the Gulf as the newest laboratory for half-baked Heritage Foundation policy proposals. Grover Norquist may have been the first prominent conservative to try to pass off the Gulf as a rationale for more tax cuts, but he's hardly the only one.

The latest offender is the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which published an agonizingly naive editorial today advocating a flat tax for the Gulf:

Why not allow the Gulf to operate as a laboratory for a flat tax, with an 18% rate and no taxes whatsoever on capital investment for businesses -- small and large? And if this works for New Orleans, as it has for so many of the former economically ravaged nations of East Europe, then make it the law of the land.

...Congressman Bobby Jindal, who represents a large slice of New Orleans and whose own home has been nearly destroyed, warns that now is not the time for a bidding war of spending between the two parties. Rather, he says, "We now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to let the free market policies that we know will work for New Orleans flourish." And if it works there, why not everywhere? (my emphasis)

Note Jindal's metaphysical certainty about "the free market policies that we know will work for New Orleans" -- a perfect expression of the faith-based economic policy that has taken over the Republican Party.

Another misleading WSJ statistic

As part of my months-long effort to compile misleading claims Wall Street Journal editorial page, let me briefly note their latest bogus statistic:

The startling bottom line on Bush administration profligacy is this: At $22,000 per household, federal spending is at an inflation-adjusted post-World War II high and set to go still higher soon as the Baby Boomers start drawing Medicare and Social Security.

But what the Journal doesn't tell you is that current spending levels relative to GDP are historically low. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that federal spending will be approximately 20 percent of GDP over the next five years including costs for Katrina relief and reconstruction. "[T]his level of spending will be lower, as a share of the economy," they write, "than federal spending in every year from 1975 through 1996."

The irony is that the Journal likes to downplay deficit projections by making historical comparisons of the deficit as a percentage of GDP (a valid metric). But when it comes to federal spending, levels of GDP go out the window. Surprise, surprise.

Under Alterman's skin

I think our good friend Eric Alterman is still mad about our recent disagreement -- apparently I'm now the "Blogworld Language Police":

Again, Fred Barnes is right. With a Republican Congress and no re-election to face, Bush does not need to be popular to continue ruining our country. (Note to Blogworld Language Police: I am not saying Bush, himself, thinks he is ruining the country and enjoys doing so, and therefore does intentionally. I am saying that is the net effect of his actions, regardless of his intentions.)

Bill Frist: Not so bright

This item describes a supposedly endearing Bill Frist anecdote about a teddy bear that someone didn't think through:

Is America ready for a president who wears clogs and plays with a teddy bear? Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist thinks so. The heart surgeon and undeclared White House hopeful has recently been sending us colorful E-mails about his travels in what appears to be a bid to show a folksier side as he considers the 2008 race. His latest includes "12 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Bill Frist," as written by his kids. Among them: He prefers Dr. Scholl's clogs in the operating room and practiced stitches on his teddy bear.

How cute. Here's one more. Frist also adopted a series of cats from animal shelters as pets and then "practiced" his heart surgery techniques on them.

The GOP/conservative pundit nexus

Via Wonkette, more depressing news about the "journalists" in the pundit corps:

When John G. Roberts is approved as chief justice of the United States, as expected, he can thank President Bush 's "Friends & Allies" program, which went to work on him immediately after he was nominated. The project, started by the Republican National Committee in the 2004 re-election campaign, is simple and effective: Give opinion makers, media friends, and even cocktail party hosts insider info on the topic of the day. How? Through E-mailed talking points, called D.C. Talkers, and conference calls. For Roberts, it worked this way: A daily conference call to about 80 pundits, GOP-leaning radio and TV hosts, and newsmakers was made around 9 a.m. On the other end were the main Roberts gunslingers like Steve Schmidt at the White House and Ken Mehlman and Brian Jones at the RNC. D.C. Talkers would then be distributed to an even larger list filled with positive info about Roberts and lines of attack on his critics. "The idea," said one of those involved, "is to feed them information and have them invested in us." It has even created addicts, he added. "Now they come to us before going on TV."

Is it any wonder so many conservative pundits follow the party line?

What is Judy Woodruff talking about?

People in the media can't interpret polls to save their life -- here's CNN's Judy Woodruff embarrassing herself on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: Let's look at the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll for the latest numbers on President Bush. Job approval: 40 percent. That's the lowest we've ever had for George Bush in his five years as president. Fifty-five percent disapproval. Handling of Iraq? Only 37 percent approve of the way he's handling Iraq. Fifty-eight disapprove. And how did the Bush administration do with Katrina? Satisfied, 38; dissatisfied, 58. Gwen Ifill, twin challenges confronting this president, Katrina and Iraq.

MS. GWEN IFILL: And all of them are unpalatable for him. The approval numbers are almost less interesting to me than the last two because the approval numbers have been knocking around in the 40s for a while. Not good but he was willing to survive with that and to work with that. The real problem is that this president--the way he has always been praised is for his ability to lead and his ability to protect us. And it looks like in the last couple of weeks neither of those things seem true...

MR. RUSSERT: Judy Woodruff, what's your take?

MS. JUDY WOODRUFF: I do think these numbers are significant, because as Gwen said, it's been rolling around, around 40 percent, but this is the first time the negative job performance has outweighed positive. On the feeling thermometer, as you call it, negatives outweigh the positives.

Um, no. It isn't true that "this is the first time the negative job performance has outweighed positive." More Americans have disapproved of Bush's job performance than have approved of it for some time now, dating back as far as the early months of this year in some polls. If by "feeling thermometer" she actually means positive or negative feelings toward Bush, two major polls have also shown more Americans with negative than positive evaluations of Bush before - Gallup in July and ABC News in June (though it is true that other polls showed greater number of Americans indicating favorable feelings toward Bush until recently).

Once again, the media is slow to catch on to the fact that Bush is not a popular president.

Bill Clinton dodges the Hillary pledge issue

From today's Meet the Press -- the Clintons are still dodging the pledge issue:

MR. RUSSERT: She [Hillary] should avoid making a pledge that she'll serve another full six-year term.

MR. CLINTON: Yeah, I think she should say she wants to be judged on both her record and her plans for the future, but I think, you know, for figures that are large figures in their parties who honestly don't know and can't know this early whether they're going to run, we have no idea what facts will unfold. I don't think they should make commitments. President Bush didn't make a commitment when he ran for re-election as governor of Texas and he was remarkably candid. He said, "You know, the voters will have to take this into account if it bothers them," but I think that that's where big figures in both parties are in a position where two years in chance, they may think they will, they may think they won't, but the truth is they don't know because there could be lots of intervening events. So I think she should just run, put her service out there, put her plans for the future out there and trust the voters of New York to make a judgment.

What is Michael Barone talking about?

Michael Barone, writing in the Wall Street Journal today, claims the following (subscription required):

Most Americans accumulate significant, six-figure wealth in the course of their lifetimes. During the late 1990s stock market boom, most household wealth was in financial instruments, but today and before the late 1990s the majority of household wealth was in residential real estate. And in politics the key economic issue for voters may be changing, from concern about short-term income to concern about the long-term, lifelong project of accumulating wealth.

Barone's first claim is accurate -- Census data shows that most Americans over age 65 have a median household net worth of more than $100,000 (though far fewer younger Americans do so). However, the same Census data shows that his claim that "most household wealth was in financial instruments" during the late 1990s is false. At the aggregate level, 53 percent of overall household wealth was invested in non-financial instruments in 1998, a figure that declined only slightly -- to 51 percent -- by 2000. Similarly, when we look at the disaggregated data, we can see that the middle quintile of households by monthly income had, on average, 53.4 percent of their net worth in real estate, motor vehicles and/or a business in 1998 and 50.7 percent in 2000. (Those in the lower two quintiles had even less invested in financial instruments.)

In short, the claim that "most household wealth was in financial instruments" during the late 1990s boom isn't even close to correct. Did Barone even look at the data, or did he just make these claims up off the top of his head?

The tide turns against Bush

How quickly things change in politics.

In February and March 2005, GOP-leaning scholars surveyed by James Lindgren of Northwestern University implausibly rated President Bush the sixth-best president in US history.

Even on Sept. 7, almost two weeks after Katrina hit, Fred Barnes published an op-ed quoting a Bush aide who touted the President's low approval numbers as proof that the administration is "changing history." "The difference is between polls in the 40s and changing history and being in the 60s and twiddling your thumbs," he said. "We'll take the 40s. That's our motto."

Now, however, the administration is in full blown panic mode. Bush's approval ratings are at unprecedented lows, as the Washington Post demonstrates in this graphic timeline (see this post for more):

And according to Rep. Tom Reynolds, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Social Security privatization -- the centerpiece of Bush's second term agenda -- is dead in this Congress.

As The Note pointed out yesterday, Bush is an unprecedented situation:

He has never seen his poll numbers take this kind of hit among Republicans before.

He has never seen his poll numbers on "strong leader" and "can handle a crisis" take such a hit before.

...He has never had to take "responsibility" for such death-infused tragedy before.

...He has never been perceived as such a potential liability by others in his party looking to hold their seats before.

He has never lacked The Other -- an enemy to demonize and to contrast with himself and his policies in the eyes of the media and the public before.

So what's the plan? First, lots of spending. And as Josh Marshall has emphasized, Bush has put Karl Rove in charge of reconstruction, which will likely turn the disaster zone into a playland of patronage and half-baked conservative policies.

At a deeper level, though, it's not clear the Bushies know what to do. Due to the approval boost provided by 9/11, they've never had to play by normal political rules. Many of the tactics that worked when Bush was at 60 or 70 in the polls are a flop at 38 or 41. Similarly, the President has never had to moderate his hard-edged pseudo-conservatism. What this means is that the administration is unlikely to adjust quickly enough to reverse its political fortunes, especially given that the economy may tip into recession before Bush leaves office.

The shocking result is that it's actually possible to imagine President Hillary. Democrats are unlikely to pick up more than a few seats in 2006 due to gerrymandering, but they will be well-positioned for 2008. It's hard to remember the last two-term president who left office as unpopular as Bush will likely be. Bush's ratings are far below those of Clinton and Reagan at this point in their second terms. Aside from Richard Nixon, no modern two-term president has left office with these type of numbers. Of course, Bush has more than three years left, but the dynamics of the situation are all tilting against him going forward.

Meanwhile, conservatives are desperately trying to point fingers elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that, "[w]ith media help, Democrats and the left have used Katrina to portray a systemic collapse of 'conservative' government. It was certainly a collapse of government, but more accurately of bureaucracy and the welfare state." And, via Brad DeLong, James Pinkerton is blaming the press explicitly for the drop in Bush's approval ratings:

[T]he MSM is still out there, and it's having an impact.

How much impact? Let's look at the polls, which show that Bush's approval rating has dropped three or four points, to between 38 and 42 percent...

So what happened? To put it plainly, the substantial pro-Bush contingent of the New Media -- that is, cable news, talk radio, and the Net -- was overwhelmed. Yes, the blogosphere could take down Dan Rather, but that was a dry and slow process of threshing out real and counterfeit typewriter fonts, military phraseology, and antique zip codes.

By contrast, Katrina is wetly overwhelming; even Fox News is in high dudgeon. So while a few bloggers are hacking away at the accreting conventional wisdom that Everything is Bush's Fault, that battle is being lost even before Bush's big "I take responsibility" concession on Tuesday.

In other words, the MSM got there firstest with the mostest.

Constantly finding excuses for the administration's policy failures is an ugly habit of mind. As I've mentioned, National Review's Rob Dreher has knocked down the idea that the administration didn't screw up during Katrina:

It would be very wrong, I believe, to let the ignominious Michael Brown be the scapegoat for FEMA's sins. Check out this front-pager from the WaPo. Turns out that a raft of FEMA's top leaders have little or no emergency management experience, but are instead politically well connected to the GOP and the White House. This is a scandal, a real scandal. How is it possible that four years after 9/11, the president treats a federal agency vital to homeland security as a patronage prize? The main reason I've been a Bush supporter all along is I trusted him (note past tense) on national security -- which, in the age of mass terrorism, means homeland security too. Call me naive, but it's a real blow to learn that political hacks have been running FEMA, of all agencies of the federal government! What if al-Qaeda had blown the New Orleans levees? How much worse would the crony-led FEMA's response have been? Would conservatives stand for any of this for one second if a Democrat were president? If this is what Republican government means, God help the poor GOP Congressmen up for re-election in 2006.

Similarly, blaming the media for everything is a lazy excuse, as John Podhoretz points out on National Review's blog The Corner (via Andrew Sullivan):

Perhaps today's astounding DeLay quote about how there's no way to cut the federal budget will offer a useful reminder to conservatives that while they may be aligned with Republican Congressional politicians, Republican Congressional politicians are just that -- politicians first. There is too often a rush on to defend any and every GOP pol by conservative bloggers and e-mailers on the grounds that if they're being attacked by the MSM, they're victims of injustice. Sometimes, though, they're just...indefensible.

The larger problem is that Republicans at the elite and mass levels have routinized the process of excusing President Bush for every screwup and mistake, as Matthew Yglesias notes in pointing to the findings of a CBS poll:

How is it, then, that Bush is rated so much better than the federal government he heads, and the disaster agency run by his appointee, the much-beloved "Brownie?" This is part-and-parcel of a very frightening cult of personality that's been erected around the person of George W. Bush ever since 9/11 with the effective complicity of the rightwing media.

I'm constantly reading Weekly Standard articles about how Don Rumsfeld or someone is messing something up and betraying Bush's pure and awesome vision, or seeing National Review writers talk about how Bush is a great president and it's too bad he doesn't care about limited government. Meanwhile, we've seen huge numbers of mainstream media types accept the view that "strong leadership," "moral clarity," and "bold vision" are the proper metrics for evaluating the performance of an elected official rather than actual policy results. The view that it's his fault when bad things happen -- or, at a minimum, that it becomes his fault when he refuses to take corrective action -- doesn't seem to occur to a very large number of people.

For democracy to work, we need to hold government accountable. And between the mishandling of Katrina, failing to capture Osama Bin Laden, a disastrously executed war in Iraq, and huge deficits looming in the future, there's a lot to hold President Bush accountable for right now. I hope that's something every American can recognize.

Update 9/16: Kevin Drum kindly let me know that I got Lindgren's name wrong again - apologies. It's fixed above.

Drudge up to old tricks

Drudge's headline:

REUTERS has acknowledged Bush 'Potty Note' photo was enhanced via Photoshop...

Sounds like the widely circulated pic was doctored, right? Wrong. According to the article he linked, Reuters just cleaned up some overexposure on the note. I'm sure someone will take the bait, though.

Picture of the day: Martha & Diddy

I'm swamped (my comprehensive exams are next week), so until I can post more, here's your picture of the day courtesy of Gawker:

Today's lesson in Rap 101? Vocabulary!

On the blackboard:

1. Cheddar
2. Shorty
3. Flossin'
4. Benjamins
5. Ballin'

Martha: "Is 'cheddar' cheese?"
Diddy: "No. No no no no no no. No."
Us: Insert gun in mouth.

Conservatives and the press open up on Bush

For almost five years, conservatives inside and outside the White House have refused to tell us what they really think about President Bush and the state of conservatism for fear of retaliation. Likewise, the media has generally been a lapdog, cowering in fear of accusations of liberal bias. But with Bush's approval ratings at record lows and his departure from office looming, the dam appears to be breaking.

As Dan Froomkin points out, a slew of unflattering stories about Bush have been published in the aftermath of Katrina (see his article for links):

Amid a slew of stories this weekend about the embattled presidency and the blundering government response to the drowning of New Orleans, some journalists who are long-time observers of the White House are suddenly sharing scathing observations about President Bush that may be new to many of their readers.

Is Bush the commanding, decisive, jovial president you've been hearing about for years in so much of the mainstream press?

Maybe not so much.

Judging from the blistering analyses in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere these past few days, it turns out that Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private. He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to comprehend concepts that don't emerge from his gut. He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read. And oh yes, one of his most significant legacies -- the immense post-Sept. 11 reorganization of the federal government which created the Homeland Security Department -- has failed a big test.

Maybe it's Bush's sinking poll numbers -- he is, after all, undeniably an unpopular president now. Maybe it's the way that the federal response to the flood has cut so deeply against Bush's most compelling claim to greatness: His resoluteness when it comes to protecting Americans.

But for whatever reason, critical observations and insights that for so long have been zealously guarded by mainstream journalists, and only doled out in teaspoons if at all, now seem to be flooding into the public sphere.

These stories were driven, in part, by rare blind quotes from high-level White House officials that portrayed Bush in an unflattering light. Via Kevin Drum, John Podhoretz notes the importance of this development:

What's interesting about the stories [in Time and Newsweek] is that they suggest there's been a change at the Bush White House because they feature unnamed sources saying nasty things about the president. One of the remarkable aspects of this White House has been the fanatical loyalty its people have displayed toward Bush -- even talking to friendly journalists like me, it's been nearly impossible to get past the feel-good spin. If that's really changing, if staffers are beginning to separate themselves from their boss emotionally and indulge in on-background carping and cavilling, then two things are true. 1) Bush is about to suffer the agony that has afflicted all previous recent administrations -- the "who said that!" rages that distract our leaders and make them feel isolated in their jobs. 2) News stories are about to get a whole lot more interesting, and White House reporters are going to stop complaining about how hard it is to cover Bush.

In addition, conservative pundits are starting to break away from Bush after years of marching in lockstep. As I've mentioned, David Brooks is castigating the GOP as "a party that doesn’t have a political philosophy" and admitting that "From Day One, [the Bush White House] had decided that our public relations is not going to be honest." And, via Andrew Sullivan, the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson is bashing the state of modern conservatism:

Conservative institutions, conceived for combat, have in power become self-perpetuating, churning their direct-mail lists in pursuit of cash from the orthodontist in Wichita and the Little Old Lady in Dubuque, so the activists can continue to fund the all-important work of . . . churning their direct-mail lists. The current story of Jack Abramoff's lucrative self-dealing, involving as it does such movement stalwarts as Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, may seem lunatic in its excesses, but the excesses aren't the point. The point is the ease with which the stalwarts commandeered the greasy machinery of Washington power. Conservative activists came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well. The grease rubbed off, too.

...Conservatism nowadays is increasingly a creature of its technology. It is shaped--if I were a Marxist I might even say determined--by cable television and talk radio, with their absurd promotion of caricature and conflict, and by blogs, where the content ranges from Jesuitical disputes among hollow-cheeked obsessives to feats of self-advertisement and professional narcissism... that would have been unthinkable in polite company as recently as a decade ago. Most conservative books are pseudo-books: ghostwritten pastiches whose primary purpose seems to be the photo of the "author" on the cover. What a tumble! From The Conservative Mind to Savage Nation; from Clifton White to Dick Morris; from Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa to Sean Hannity and Mark Fuhrman--all in little more than a generation's time. Whatever this is, it isn't progress.

What will we find out next?

More from Alterman

For those who are still interested in the vitriol of Eric Alterman, I've posted a second update to my post about his attacks on me below.

Review - The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney

Chris Mooney, who appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night, has written a very important book. I want to recommend that everyone pick up a copy of The Republican War on Science.

The reason why I am endorsing the book is simple: it addresses a very important part of the problem that we described on Spinsanity and in All the President's Spin. In the public sphere, PR-driven spin is increasingly substituting for reasoned debate, and that is a very bad thing for democracy. Chris was one of the first people to understand the importance of what we were doing at Spinsanity, and I think that perspective informs his take here. TRWOS takes a deeply reported and researched look at how conservatives are using PR to confuse debate over science and science policy on issues ranging from evolution to global warming to embryonic stem cell research.

It is true, of course, that Chris is a liberal, but I want to assure people that he is no hack. He takes science very seriously, and has criticized liberals for abusing science as well. He makes a strong argument in the book that conservatives have gone much further in politicizing science than liberals, and that is reflected in the unprecedented response to this administration from the scientific community. In addition, the book is very careful to differentiate the science from larger policy questions. For instance, Mooney grants that one can legitimately oppose efforts to mitigate global warming because of, say, cost-benefit concerns. But he is rightly insistent that the scientific consensus about climate change should not be distorted for political reasons.

The problem Chris addresses is that PR has shown political organizations how to manipulate public debate - by creating confusion over known facts and accepted conclusions, which are amplified by journalists who play by the "he said," "she said" conventions of "objective" journalism. (Mooney has written about this problem in the past.) And because corporations and the religious right have a shared interest in fighting back against the conclusions of scientists on a variety of issues, legions of conservative think tanks and faux-scientists are now waging a well-funded war to muddy the waters and promote their pre-defined conclusions.

TRWOS is a detailed takedown of this massive effort to distort and politicize science. Even if you don't agree with Mooney's politics, you should read this book.

Update 9/13: For those who are curious, Kevin Drum has posted a review that quotes part of Mooney's argument for why Bush is different from Clinton in his treatment of science.

Update 9/15: Mooney is scheduled to appear on NPR's "Fresh Air" today -- see their website for more information.

[Disclosure: I read an early version of the manuscript for the book and gave Chris feedback on it.]

Brooks describes dishonest White House PR strategy

Media Matters has transcribed a fascinating admission from David Brooks during his appearance on The Chris Matthews Show:

MATTHEWS: Do you think there's a problem with this? I remember when the president wrote in his diary -- his father, President Bush senior -- "you know, I picked [former Vice President Dan] Quayle the first time around, and I wish I hadn't. But I'm stuck with him, and I can't admit it." Is there a problem with this president simply admitting, "I put the wrong people at certain jobs, I didn't get back fast enough to the White House, I wasn't calling the orders fast enough?"

BROOKS: From Day One, they had decided that our public relations is not going to be honest. Privately, they admit mistakes all the time. Publicly -- and I've had this debate with them since Day One; I always say admit a mistake, people will give you credit --

MATTHEWS: Who do you debate this with?

BROOKS: With people who work in the White House.

MATTHEWS: I thought you were talking about with the president in the back room.

[laughter]

BROOKS: Not with him, but they represent what he believes, which is, if you admit a mistake, you get no credit from your enemies, and then you open up another week's story, because the admission of a little mistake leads to the admission of big mistakes and another week's story. It's totally tactical and totally insincere.

When was Brooks going to tell us? He's addressed this issue in the past, but never so explicitly, as MM points out:

Brooks himself previously addressed the Bush administration's refusal to admit error -- both in his Times column and on PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, on which he makes weekly appearances. In his November 2, 2004, column, Brooks wrote: "I'm exasperated at the Bush communications strategy. His advisers came in with one rule: no concessions to elite opinion. They decided not to be open on how they make decisions. They would never admit mistakes." In his September 9, 2003, debut as a Times columnist, he noted: "The Bush administration has the most infuriating way of changing its mind. The leading Bushies almost never admit serious mistakes. They never acknowledge that they are listening to their critics. They never even admit they are shifting course. They don these facial expressions suggesting calm omniscience while down below their legs are doing the fox trot in six different directions." On the November 14, 2003, broadcast of the NewsHour, Brooks said of the Bush administration: "Well, the good news about them is that they won't admit mistakes, but they are ruthlessly pragmatic when forced to be." In none of these instances, however, did Brooks indicate -- as he did on September 11 -- that deception was premeditated, or that he had "since Day One" discussed with White House officials their strategy to engage in deception rather than admit mistakes.

"We'll take the 40s"

In the Fred Barnes op-ed I mentioned last week, a Bush aide makes a striking statement defending the President's terrible poll numbers:

[T]he simple fact of governing in Washington is that popularity is not a measure of power. In the late '90s, President Clinton's approval rating stayed well above 60%, even after he was impeached. But Mr. Clinton had almost no clout. True, this was partly because he faced a Republican Congress. A Bush aide was accurate (if self-serving) in drawing the distinction this way: "The difference is between polls in the 40s and changing history and being in the 60s and twiddling your thumbs. We'll take the 40s. That's our motto."

Given that Bush's poll numbers have slid even further since the Barnes op-ed, what's the new slogan going to be? Building an empire in the high 30s?

On a more serious note, this quote shows that the Bush people have realized that the President is not very popular, but they're still going to try to push ahead with their agenda (ie "changing history") no matter what. Bush may be able to keep getting legislation enacted since the GOP controls Congress, but this approach doesn't augur well for the Republican Party in the long term. The further they push now, the more the American people will push back later.

Watch Chris Mooney on the Daily Show tonight!

I forgot to note that my friend Chris Mooney will be discussing his excellent new book The Republican War on Science on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" tonight. Make sure to tune in, and check back tomorrow morning for the post-mortem and my (belated) review of the book.

When Alterman attacks

On Saturday morning, Eric Alterman sent me this charming email in reference to my post about him:

You are making a jerk of yourself which is why I am doing you the favor of ignoring these baseless accusations on the blog. You have now twice accused me of imputing intentions to the administration on the basis of zero evidence. When I say something wrong, fine. When I say something that you (alone) interpret to imply what I mean--without any evidence whatsoever--it might be a good idea not to make a public accusation. I have never, ever accused Bush et al of what you say. And if I did believe it, I wouldn't say it, having no evidence to support it save my own feelings. The idea that you do this in the context of playing language cop is, shall we say, ironic.

Feel free to print this. I have nothing to hide.

A followup email added:

It occurs to me that I am being accused of accusing Bush et al of thinking something they have not said by someone who is accusing me of thinking something I did not say, This same individual purports to be policing the standard of public discourse. This is, I believe, triply ironic, and perhaps quadruply ridiculous.

And then today Alterman lashed out at me on his blog:

The sad fact is that the Bush administration has done little about preparing the nation for another terrorist attack in the past four years—just look here and here, while it does plenty to make one more likely—creating more hatred in the Arab world and more support for those who would give their lives to kill us, and less willingness to follow our leadership everywhere else.  I am not saying, as a foolish young blogger named Brendan Nyhan idiotically insists, that Bush has done this because he wants more terrorism.  I don’t pretend to know what Bush wants, but I would be honestly surprised if it included killing lots of brave American soldiers for no good reason.  (Hmmm, Nyhan, the little language cop, professes to know what I think but have not said about what Bush thinks but has not said.  Someone call George Orwell… or Alanis Morissette.)  What I am saying, and have been saying all along, is that George Bush is so blinkered by his ideological obsessions, coupled with his intellectual laziness, personal pique, and professional incompetence, that he cannot see what is plainly before him and hence, has failed in his most fundamental duty as president: to provide for the security of the nation.

So what did I do to get Alterman so riled up? I called him on the plain implications of his language:

One of the key tactics of political jargon* is confounding intention and (alleged) effect, as in this passage from Eric Alterman today:

In the name of fighting "terrorism," the administration has sent 40 percent of the National Guard to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away.

The phrase "in order to" clearly implies that the Bush administration wanted to "create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away." Alterman would no doubt claim that he's just being sarcastic, but that's an easy excuse that allows him (and people like him) to make this sort of vile suggestion.

(* By jargon, I mean the highly engineered and manipulative language used by pundits, politicians and PR experts.)

This is not a radical idea. The phrase "in order to [x]" has a clearly accepted meaning -- an action taken with the intention or goal of doing [x]:

Idiom: in order to do something
So as to be able to do it.
Thesaurus: to, with a view to, with the intention of, with the purpose of, intending to.

And if you peruse this Google search, you'll find Alterman using the phrase that way over and over. Yet he is angry that I took his words seriously in the quotation presented above. To state the obvious, I have no idea what he personally believes -- I can only judge him by what he writes. If I am wrongly interpreting his statement, what does Alterman suggest the phrase "in order to" actually means? Of course, he has no answer, so he vaguely disparages me for allegedly trying to read his mind and engages in ad hominem attacks ("foolish," "the little language cop," "idiotically," etc.). Nowhere does he address the substance of my criticism. Draw your own conclusions.

Update 9/12 -- Here is the email exchange I had with Alterman today (he has given me permission to reprint it):

Nyhan:

That’s some sloppy ad hominem on the blog, and you didn’t link to the original post about you. Anyway, my response is here: http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/09/when_alterman_a.html

I’ll happ[il]y print any further comments you have there.

Alterman:

I'm sorry but your original blog item is unworthy of a considered response (though I thought I did link to it). What kind of person would accuse George Bush of wanting to murder American soldiers and create terrorism on purpose? And given that, what kind of person would willfully misread what I wrote to pretend I said that?

Someone of bad faith, that's who..

Nyhan:

Did you read my original post before flying off at the handle? You linked to the one about Yglesias, but that was a followup to this one: http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/09/altermans_antib.html

And as I said in my response today ( http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/09/when_alterman_a.html ), if I’m willfully misreading you, what does the phrase “in order to” mean? I don’t think you believe Bush intentionally tried to murder American soldiers, but that’s precisely what your original phrasing suggested.

Finally, I’m certainly not acting in bad faith – I’ve praised your writing in the past multiple times, you linked to Spinsanity frequently, etc. More fundamentally, I spent 3 1/2 years building up a strong reputation for fairness and accuracy on Spinsanity. I take that seriously.

Alterman:

And as I said in my response today ( http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/09/when_alterman_a.html ), if I’m willfully misreading you, what does the phrase “in order to” mean? I don’t think you believe Bush intentionally tried to murder American soldiers, but that’s precisely what your original phrasing suggested.

Only to someone of bad faith deliberately misrepresenting what I said... to someone who is familiar with who I am and my work, it would be obvious that I was pointing out that this was the result, rather than the intention...

Nyhan:

What about all the readers who go to your blog and aren’t “familiar” with who you are and your work? Where’s the decoder ring? Not to mention, I’m familiar with you and your work, but the phrase “in order to” still suggests intentional action.

In short, Alterman (who admits he did not offer a "considered response") says his statement is ok because "in order to" means what he says it means to people "familiar" with his work. As I noted above, this is an exceptionally weak argument. First, it assumes everyone who reads his blog is familiar with his work, which is not true. In addition, I'm quite familiar with his work (I have read several of his books and read his blog daily), but his assertion doesn't change the meaning of the phrase.

On a deeper level, Alterman's logic is deeply flawed. It implies we cannot directly assess the meaning implied or suggested by people's words, but instead should speculate about their intentions based on our knowledge of the person in question. The problem, however, is that we cannot know what someone's intentions are, nor does knowledge of the person resolve the question of what their "true" meaning was.

Just to illustrate the absurdity of this, I would note that it implies Alterman should no longer criticize conservatives whose work he is not familiar with, since the meaning of their words can only be interpreted in that context. More seriously, such an approach would prevent us from criticizing people who use language that implies things they cannot or will not state explicitly -- a heavily-used tactic in today's political discourse.

Finally, I want to clear up a confusion Alterman is promoting that came up several times in comments from readers. I did not say Alterman thinks Bush intentionally tried to "create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away." I said that his language implies this. Some people seem to be having trouble separating the two, but it's very important to do so. For instance, when I criticize President Bush for implying Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, I'm not saying Bush believes Saddam was behind 9/11 -- I have no idea if that's true. I'm saying his language leaves his audience with that impression, which is not supported by any solid evidence.

Update 9/13 -- I'm sick of this, but Alterman has replied again and given me permission to reprint his email, so here it is:

My readers are apparently either a lot smarter or more honest than you are since I receive hundreds of emails a day at Altercation and not one interpreted what I wrote the way you did. And as you point out, I've used the formulation many times, and never before have I seen the accusation, that I can recall, though perhaps someone like David Horowitz or Andrew Sullivan has made it and I've missed that. In any case, the phrase only suggests "intentional action" to those who would willfully misrepresent who I am and what I do. In the past twenty-three years, I've written six books, hundreds of columns and articles and a few thousand blog items. I have never accused any American official of seeking to kill Americans on purpose or wishing to. Indeed, I can't remember many times, if at all, I ever professed to know the motives of anyone for doing anything. I tend to keep my analysis on the level of results.

You know that--or at least the rough outlines--and you ignored it, dishonestly. For what reason, I can't know and don't really care, but it was a big, big mistake on your part. You may think I am over-reacting but the accusation could hardly be more serious.

Oh and by the way, being unfamiliar with the work of Kundera is a pretty damning admission for someone who sets himself up as a language cop or an educated person of any kind. I'd suggest taking a break from the blog and doing some reading.

Let's quickly run through the problems with this argument. Alterman begins with a logical fallacy, suggesting that the lack of reader email interpreting his statement the way I did proves he's right. He then mischaracterizes the Google search I linked showing that he uses "in order to" to mean intentional action, claiming it somehow supports his point. Next, he denies that he has ever "accused any American official of seeking to kill Americans on purpose or wishing to." The point of my post, however, was that Alterman's language suggested such a conclusion, not that he had made a direct accusation. Then, after more claims that I am being willfully dishonest about some objective truth, it's on to the vaguely threatening language: "[the post] was a big, big mistake on your part. You may think I am over-reacting but the accusation could hardly be more serious." Finally, he offers a pompous lecture on why I am an illiterate because I've never read Kundera.

I'm not going to spend any more of my time on this nonsense, but you can see why Alterman is so widely disliked in the media world. I think lee's comment below sums things up well:

Brendan,

I think you've run up against a central truth about Eric Alterman, which is - It's all about Eric Alterman.

He's clearly a smart guy and worth reading even when one disagrees with him, and he is capable of respectful and civil disagreement (see his posts conveying grudging respect for Paul Wolfowitz) But, whenever the disagreement becomes personal (not ad hominem, just personal, as in "I think Eric Alterman is wrong, or said something dumb.") it's as if a switch gets flipped inside him. His intellectual honesty goes out the window, and he becomes hostile, insulting, and incapable of admitting to the slightest of errors. He is, in other words, not just sensitive but hyper-sensitive to critisism. How DARE this young whipper-snapper criticize ME, ERIC ALTERMAN.

Update 9/12: One last thing -- people seem to be exaggerating how important I think this is in all the "nitpick" comments below. Alterman's phrasing is representative of an important problem, but he's not a serial offender and I've written about far worse language in the past. As such, my original post was less than 100 words, and I would have never mentioned it again had Alterman not attacked me personally on his blog. If he had just apologized and corrected himself, I would have been happy, but he decided to try to bully me instead -- and when challenged, I'm going to respond.

(Note: For more on Alterman's mistakes and successes, see my previous posts on him.)

John Kerry was right

Last Wednesday, I flagged this passage from a John Kerry email to supporters:

How long will it be before [Republicans] start telling us that tax cuts for the wealthy can provide just the stimulus we need to get the Gulf Coast economy moving again?

My response: "I'd say a week, maybe less."

That turned out to be generous. On Sunday, tax-cutting apparatchik Grover Norquist became the first conservative that I've seen use Katrina as a justification for more tax cuts:

Grover Norquist, a leading advocate of substantially reducing the federal government, argued that the disaster only underlined the need for more tax cuts to spur the economy. "Step one is you deal with the problem - rebuild New Orleans," he said, "and step two, you enact economic policies so you can afford to rebuild New Orleans."

Norquist is implying that tax cuts generate revenue rather than reducing it -- a discredited bit of supply-side cant that even Bush administration economist Greg Mankiw has disavowed. And on a deeper level, Norquist has publicly declared that he wants to reduce the size of government by half so he can "drown it in a bathtub." As such, he must not believe that tax cuts will throw off additional revenue -- otherwise government would get bigger and bigger as it cuts taxes more and more (Norquist's stated goal). So we can only conclude that Norquist is being disingenuous.

Who will be the first Republican member of Congress to peddle this nonsense?

Update: I just discovered a nasty Max Sawicky post quoting Norquist making a similar point about the estate tax in a Sept. 2 appeal to senators:

The 2003 tax cut lifted economic growth far beyond what most people expected. We know repeal of the Death Tax will also have a similar effect. And higher levels of economic growth is exactly what the residents of the Gulf Region need at this time to start the rebuilding process for their neighborhoods and more importantly for their lives.

Adding insult to injury: Showing "The Man" at the Astrodome

Having seen the preview for "The Man" at least seven times, I have to say that the news that it is going to be shown to Katrina refugees at the Astrodome hurts me inside. Dateline Hollywood, which Ben Fritz of Spinsanity fame co-edits, gets it right in a very funny satire:

ASTRODOME REFUGEES ENDURE SCREENING OF "THE MAN"
FEMA blames local authorities for airing of buddy comedy

Houston -- Hurricane refugees staying at the Houston Astrodome said they had reached the limits of their tolerance for tragedy Friday when New Line Cinema arranged for a special benefit screening of new buddy comedy "The Man."

Tens of thousands lined up outside the Astrodome begging for earplugs, blindfolds, or buses to take them away from the trauma. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff blamed the screening on local disaster management authorities, while Houston and Texas officials said the federal government is responsible for the selection of entertainment in FEMA-declared emergency zones.

Many critics have noted that authorities had several days of advance warning to prepare for the arrival of "The Man," a buddy comedy starring Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy that received 84% negative reviews according to RottenTomatoes.com. Producer Robert N. Fried first warned that he was preparing a showing at the Astrodome on September 7 at the film's premiere.

But whether due to bureaucratic bungling or simple lack of compassion for refugees at the stadium, authorities were unable to stop "The Man" or provide those in attendance with basic supplies to ride out the 83-minute screening.

Bush #6 all-time?

Someone has lost their mind -- according to a survey conducted by James Lindgren of Northwestern University, "GOP-leaning scholars rated Mr. Bush the 6th-best president of all time, while Democratic ones rated him No. 35, or 6th-worst. Even Bill Clinton--13th among Democrats, 34th among Republicans--isn't as controversial."

Sixth best of all time? Let me note the top five finishers in the Londregan survey: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. Who seriously thinks Bush belongs in that kind of company?

Update 9/12: John Transue points out that I've been studying for my comprehensive exams too much -- it was Northwestern law prof James Lindgren who conducted the study, not Princeton political scientist (John) Londregan. The mistake has been corrected above.

Up is down alert: Dick Cheney

Andrew Sullivan makes a great catch:

THE TWO CHENEYS: Even in a disaster, he spins:

In his first tour of the damage, Cheney offered an upbeat assessment of what he called the "very impressive" current response efforts. "I think the progress we're making is significant," he said.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth:

A Republican with close ties to the White House, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bush had made clear that he wanted a change, a view reinforced by Vice President Dick Cheney's fact-finding trip to Mississippi and Louisiana on Thursday. Mr. Cheney, the Republican said, came back with a progress report that was critical of Mr. Brown's management.

Memo to the public: this guy will tell you anything.

Katrina fallout for Bush

Via Josh Marshall, the latest Newsweek poll is devastating to President Bush:

In Katrina's wake, the president's popularity and job-approval ratings have dropped across the board. Only 38 percent of Americans approve of the way Bush is doing his job overall, a record-low for this president in the NEWSWEEK poll. (Fifty-five percent of Americans disapprove of his overall job performance.) And only 28 percent of Americans say they are "satisfied with the way things are going" in the country, down from 36 percent in August and 46 percent in December, after the president's re-election. This is another record low and two points below the satisfaction level recorded immediately after the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal came to light. Fully two-thirds of Americans are not satisfied with the direction of the country.

But Katrina's most costly impact could be a loss of faith in government generally, and the president, in particular. A majority of Americans (57 percent) say "government's slow response to what happened in New Orleans" has made them lose confidence in government's ability to deal with another major natural disaster. Forty-seven percent say it has made them lose confidence in the government's ability to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11, but 50 percent say is has not. (Note: our question asked about "government" in general, so we cannot say whether respondents meant state, local, federal or a combo of any of the three.)

More critical to President Bush -- and the GOP's future as the nation's majority party: most Americans, 52 percent, say they do not trust the president "to make the right decisions during a domestic crisis" (45 percent do). The numbers are exactly the same when the subject is trust of the president to make the right decisions during an international crisis.

Why the gloom? Forty percent of Americans say the federal government's response to the crisis in New Orleans was poor. Thirty-two percent say it was fair; 21 percent say it was good and five percent believe it was excellent. Americans don't think much of the local and state governments' responses either: 35 percent say state and local officials did a poor job and 34 percent say they did a fair job; 20 percent say they did a good job and five percent say an excellent job after the storm hit.

The Katrina effect is evident in how Americans rate the president personally. In every category, the view of the president is at all-time lows for the NEWSWEEK poll. Only 49 percent of Americans now believe the president has strong leadership qualities. The same percentage of registered voters feel that way, 49 percent -- down from 63 percent the week before Bush's reelection. Only 42 percent of Americans believe the president cares about people like them; 44 percent of registered voters feel that way -- down from 50 percent the week before the election. And only 49 percent of Americans and the same percentage of registered voters believe Bush is intelligent and well-informed -- down from 59 percent before the election.

Similarly, public approval of the president’s policies on issues from the economy (35 percent) to the war in Iraq (36 percent) to terrorism and homeland security (46 percent) have suffered. Demonstrating the widespread havoc that Katrina has wrought on the president’s political fortunes—even far from issues of disaster response—for the first time in the four years since 9/11, more Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of terrorism and homeland security than approve of it.

Reflecting the tarnished view of the administration, only 38 percent of registered voters say they would vote for a Republican for Congress if the Congressional elections were held today, while 50 say they would vote for a Democrat.

Just to put these figures in perspective, here are some comparisons to disapproval figures from Gallup -- Bush is now comparable to Clinton in 1994 and moving towards Jimmy Carter territory:

Bill Clinton's highest disapproval rating was 54% in September 1994. In fact, several polls that year found at least 50% of Americans disapproving of Clinton's performance as president.

In the summer of his re-election bid, 60% of Americans told Gallup they disapproved of the way George H.W. Bush was handling the presidency. Across the 14 polls conducted from May 1992 through October 1992, a majority of Americans expressed disapproval in Bush.

In January 1983, 56% of Americans said they disapproved of Ronald Reagan. Five polls conducted from December 1982 through February 1983 found at least 50% of Americans disapproving of Reagan.

Many of the polls conducted in 1979 and 1980 found majority disapproval of Jimmy Carter's performance. His highest disapproval was 59% in June and July 1979.

Just prior to his resignation as president, 66% of Americans said they disapproved of the way Richard Nixon was handling the presidency.

In March 1968, Gallup found that 52% of Americans disapproved of Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson's disapproval ratings were at 50% or higher only four times in his presidency.

Harry Truman scored the highest disapproval rating in Gallup's history -- 67% -- in January 1952. Truman also scored the lowest approval rating in Gallup's history, 23%, in the same poll.

Are cronyism and PR the future?

In the aftermath of Katrina, it's clear that the Bush administration has modernized the wrong part of government. We're getting 21st century PR combined with 19th century patronage -- an ugly combination that represents a double step backward for the country.

For instance, it turns out that Michael Brown isn't the only unqualified political hack at FEMA. In fact, as the Washington Post and Knight Ridder report (via Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum), the leadership is dominated by cronies and hangers-on. Here's KR:

In 2000, 40 percent of the top FEMA jobs were held by career workers who rose through the ranks of the agency, including chief of staff. By 2004, that figure was down to less than 19 percent, and the deputy director/chief of staff job is held by a former TV anchor turned political operative...

Of the top 15 FEMA spots in Washington, the only people who had experience or have a single permanent job - some employees of FEMA are holding down two positions - are the agency's top lawyer, its equal rights director, its technology chief and its inner-agency planning chief. None of them is responsible for disaster response or preparations.

And here's the Post:

Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.

Meanwhile, as Laura Rozen notes via Brad DeLong, the Bush administration's PR-driven approach to crises is in full swing. Mark Pfeifle, a press operative who ran the White House Social Security "war room," has already been shifted to being a FEMA spokesperson to clean up the mess. Perhaps they need help over there diverting firefighters for photo-ops?

As Atrios points out, at least one conservative gets the problem -- Rod Dreher at National Review:

It would be very wrong, I believe, to let the ignominious Michael Brown be the scapegoat for FEMA's sins. Check out this front-pager from the WaPo. Turns out that a raft of FEMA's top leaders have little or no emergency management experience, but are instead politically well connected to the GOP and the White House. This is a scandal, a real scandal. How is it possible that four years after 9/11, the president treats a federal agency vital to homeland security as a patronage prize? The main reason I've been a Bush supporter all along is I trusted him (note past tense) on national security -- which, in the age of mass terrorism, means homeland security too. Call me naive, but it's a real blow to learn that political hacks have been running FEMA, of all agencies of the federal government! What if al-Qaeda had blown the New Orleans levees? How much worse would the crony-led FEMA's response have been? Would conservatives stand for any of this for one second if a Democrat were president? If this is what Republican government means, God help the poor GOP Congressmen up for re-election in 2006.

The Bush adminstration must pay a heavy price for failing to respond adequately to the disaster. All future governments must realize that patronage does not pay, especially when it comes to homeland security and disaster relief -- or we're all in big trouble.

Media fact-checking during Katrina

I want to note the (brief) surge in factual scrutiny of administration claims in the press during Katrina. In particular, CNN did some excellent work on TV and on their website. See this story and this one for classic examples of vigorous media fact-checking of exactly the sort we asked for in All the President's Spin. The problem, however, is that the press can only muster brief interludes of skeptical coverage before going back to old "he said," "she said" habits, as it's starting to do right now. Still, it's a start.

Fake comments

I just deleted about 35 spam comments that were posted to the blog last night, so I'm considering requiring TypeKey comment authentication. Any thoughts? I hate to impede the free flow of feedback, but I don't want to spend my time policing the spammers either.

Update 9/11: The spam comments keep coming, so I've turned on comment approval, which means that your comments won't appear immediately on the site. It's still better than having every thread corrupted by spam, though. If this is too much of a pain, I may go to TypeKey, but hopefully it'll stem the tide. Note: If you submit a comment and it doesn't get approved within a couple of days, it may have gotten lost in the waves of spam -- just email me and I'll make sure to approve it.

Brown is out

Finally, after reports from The New Republic and Time about his weak/inflated resume, Michael Brown is out. Apparently Bush finally realized that "Brownie" isn't doing "a heck of a job" after all.

That said, though, this is clearly a case of too little, too late. Post-Katrina poll numbers (including the AP poll released today) have Bush in the 39-42 percent approval range, which is getting down to the hardcore Republican base.

Update 9/10: As commenters point out, Brown hasn't been actually fired from FEMA -- he's just been reassigned to Washington. Unbelievable -- the Responsibility Era continues...

Liberal jargon watch: Matthew Yglesias

Like Eric Alterman, Matthew Yglesias is sarcastically conflating intention with (alleged) effect in the war in Iraq (and invoking Nuremberg and totalitarianism):

"FREEDOM" WALK. The Pentagon's planned "freedom walk" to commemorate September 11 on Sunday seems to involve precious little freedom, as Atrios notes. It also seems to have precious little to do with commemorating 9-11. Indeed, while I hesitate to throw this kind of rhetoric around, it seems fair to say that the Defense Department has decided to use your tax dollars to finance a Nuremberg-style rally aimed at bolstering political support for the incumbent party and smearing the opposition as un-patriotic. Not that I think Bush is about to start firing up the gas chambers, but Milan Kundera's thoughts on totalitarian kitsch seem apropos.

...The good news is that on September 24, there'll be another concert on the mall organized by anti-war musicians featuring some of my favorite bands. Until then, remember -- loving America means wanting to see thousands of soldiers killed in an effort to ignore al-Qaeda and bring an Iranian-backed theocracy to power in Iraq.

Here's Alterman -- note the similarity in how the jargon works:

In the name of fighting "terrorism," the administration has sent 40 percent of the National Guard to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away.

As people who (rightly) decry rhetoric suggesting war opponents are intentionally hurting the country/aiding the enemy, it's more than a bit hypocritical for Yglesias and Alterman to run around suggesting that the administration is intentionally harming the nation's interests.

Update 9/9: In comments, Yglesias writes:

I think this is unfair. The suggestion "that the administration is intentionally harming the nation's interests" clearly came in the context of a satirization of the White House p.o.v. not a literal effort to characterize it. It's fair to say that satire -- Onion headlines, etc. -- are not contributions to rational debate in the same way that straight political analysis is, but unless you want to deem satire out of bounds per se it's clearly wrong to apply the standards of straight debate to satire. The anti-satire view, meanwhile, would be pretty radically at odds with the western tradition which has always maintained a role for political satire as an element of the broader discourse. The Alterman case, I would maintain, is different.

On Nuremberg and totalitarianism, meanwhile, I'm not just invoking these at random. I explicitly disavow a global Bush-Nazi comparison and instead cite Milan Kundera's specific point about kitsch, complete with the best link I could find on the web. I have in mind what he says about "The Grand March" in chapter 6 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and I think it's apropos.

I don't think I'm being unfair. What Yglesias wrote is not particularly funny, and it uses a jargon tactic I've frequently identified in the past. To approach this from another perspective, why is it that statement any more "satire" than what, say, Ann Coulter does when she falsely suggests that liberals want to do various awful things? Isn't this a distinction without a difference -- ie my aggressive jargon is "satire" and hers is vicious and awful? Conservatives certainly find what she does amusing.

As for Kundera, I'm not familiar with his writing, but "Nuremberg-style rallies" is a little much regardless of Yglesias's disavowal of gas chambers.

Update 9/9 -- Yglesias has posted a second comment:

Well, if you're not familiar with Kundera I guess we'll just leave it at that. I wonder, though, if you're trying to say that it's always illegitimate to make a comparison involving Nazis? It's irresponsible, of course, to suggest that the Bush administration (or any other actor in contemporary American politics) is just like Hitler but I think it's often fair to raise more limited comparisons in order to make a point. Jon Chait did a column defending my view of this subject.

On satire, I don't really know what to say. "[W]hy is it that statement any more 'satire' than what, say, Ann Coulter does when she falsely suggests that liberals want to do various awful things?" There's a clear difference between a false statement intended to deceive and a false statement intended as satire. Whether or not the satire is successful -- i.e., "funny" -- isn't the relevant metric. This from Ms. Coulter, for example, doesn't seem funny to me, but it's clearly satire. By contrast, when she wrote "Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy" she was writing falsely in a non-satirical vein.

It seems to me that in my post, satiric intent was made clear by the fact that the assertion "loving America means ..." was put in my voice when the audience clearly recognizes that what follows are not my true beliefs. I didn't say, "George W. Bush thinks..." and then follow with some things he didn't think.

I'll grant that what Yglesias wrote is more clearly demarcated to the reader as non-literal truth than, say, what Alterman wrote. Regardless of whether it was intended as satire, though, I don't think that suggesting people are intentionally harming the country is a particularly worthwhile use of satire (which I happen to like very much). And in the reverse situation, I doubt Yglesias would view satire the same way. For example, let's suppose that Bill Clinton had demagogued what happened in Somalia and said that people who didn't support the military effort there weren't patriotic. If Rush Limbaugh had said, "satirically," that to liberals "loving America means wanting to see scores of US soldiers killed in an effort to divert attention from real threats to our country," it would not have gone over well on the left. And in fact, Limbaugh uses this perverse form of "satire" all the time.

As for Nazi analogies, I'm not willing to say "never," but I will say this: I find it hard to come up with circumstances where they are appropriate. Here's why. Let's assume there is a continuum of economic and political freedom, with the most free democracies on one hand and the most evil regimes at the other. There are countless historical comparisons that can be made and analogies that can be drawn between different regimes along this scale. But people tend to jump right from the US (at one end) to the Nazis (at the other). Why? Well, obviously the Nazis are famous, and thus they are more accessible from memory (this is called the "availability heuristic" in psychology). But Nazis are rarely the most appropriate comparison. Is the Freedom Walk really comparable to Nuremberg? Does government regulation make the EPA comparable to Nazis? (Etc.) Almost always, the analogy isn't being used because it's accurate, but because it makes the other side look bad. I'll grant that the Nuremberg rallies are one of the most famous mass political events in history, but I still don't know that the analogy adds to Yglesias's point enough to justify its use.

The other problem with invoking the Nazis is that the negative associations associated with controversial persons, historical figures, etc. are activated outside of consciousness. In the political science and psychology literatures, this has been shown to happen immediately and automatically. Thus, someone raising the Nazis can trade on the negative associations attached to the Nazis even as they disavow the exploitation of those associations. The same applies with race, as in the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which activated racial considerations without specifically mentioning race (as Tali Mendelberg showed in an excellent Public Opinion Quarterly article).

Does this mean people can't talk about the Nazis in public discourse at all? Of course not. Serious historical and political discussion is fine. However, casual Nazi analogies almost always drag debate down rather than elevating it.

Update 9/12: Altercation readers -- my original post on Alterman is here and my response to him is here.

Tom DeLay is one classy guy

Here's Tom DeLay's classy response to Nancy Pelosi's refusal to appoint Democrats to a Republican-dominated Katrina commission:

When aides to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) attacked Pelosi's response to the investigative commission, they illustrated it with an e-mailed photo of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury intersection, associated with the hippies of the 1960s.

Because nothing says '60s liberal like opposing a partisan inquiry into one of the worst disasters in American history!

Illogic in action

From MoJo Blog via Atrios, yet another example of the administration's MO of taking a crisis and claiming that it necessitates some pre-existing policy agenda (tax cuts, ANWR, Iraq, etc.):

It's an old business myth that the Chinese character for "crisis" combines the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." It doesn't. But I'm not sure anyone's told the Bush administration, judging from this little tidbit in CongressDaily today: "[White House spokesman Trent] Duffy asserted that the vast spending that would be required to address the hurricane's impact adds to the need to change Social Security, which threatens to strain the budget in coming years." Ah yes, despite the fact that privatization that would add trillions to the deficit in the short term, at a time when Katrina will already add $100 billion or more to the deficit this year, the time for privatization is now, obviously, in the wake of disaster. Um, no.

More administration payola

Katrina has buried the latest news on the payola front -- more third parties have been caught promoting Bush administration policies without disclosing that they're receiving taxpayer dollars for doing so:

In 2003 and 2004, Garcini's nonprofit group, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Education Options (CREO), received two unsolicited grants, totaling $900,000, from the U.S. Education Department, to promote school choice and tutoring options for Hispanic children. But in two op-eds in the Morning News and a third that appeared in two Spanish-language publications earlier in 2004, Garcini never disclosed, as was required by law, that CREO had received the government grants.

Federal investigators probing the department's public relations contracts this week say the department has given nearly $4.7 million to groups including Garcini's to promote administration education priorities since 2002, but that in 10 of 11 cases examined, the groups didn't disclose -- in print, on radio or in other media, such as brochures or handbooks -- that taxpayer funds were used.

John Higgins, the department's Inspector General, found no "covert propaganda" at work, but told administration officials that they should consider asking for some of their money back.

John Kerry is right

I'm not a big fan of John Kerry, but this prediction (from an email to supporters) is dead-on:

How long will it be before [Republicans] start telling us that tax cuts for the wealthy can provide just the stimulus we need to get the Gulf Coast economy moving again?

I'd say a week, maybe less.

Fire Brown movement grows

Even top Republicans agree -- Michael Brown must go:

Senior House Republican officials said that, behind the scenes, some lawmakers were pressing the Bush administration to dismiss Michael D. Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"He's been compromised," said one top Republican lawmaker who works closely with the White House and did not want to be identified when discussing a delicate administration personnel issue.

Update 9/8: Via Andrew Sullivan, here's Bob Novak with more on GOP support for firing Brown:

The Democrats on the ground, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, have done little to commend themselves. But that does not excuse the federal performance, in the candid opinion of many Republicans. To start with, these Republicans talk about taking FEMA back from the Homeland Security Department. They agree that heads must roll, certainly Brown's and possibly Chertoff's. Above all, these Republican politicians say, let's get the lawyers out of disaster relief.

With us or against us demagoguery

Here's yet another illustration of the ugly binary logic of the Bush administration, which deals almost exclusively in false dichotomies -- with us or against us, stay the course or cut and run, etc.

As I described below, approximately 1,000 firefighters from around the country are being used as community relations specialists and PR props rather than helping in the relief effort.

I neglected to point out, however, that some of them have began refusing to wear FEMA t-shirts as a form of protest. In response, as Atrios and Salon point out, the FEMA spokesperson said this:

"I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country," said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.

Black put it best:

So, if you object to having yourself be flown across the country so you can be a human prop for the president instead of actually using your skills to help the citizens of this country then you need to revisit your commitment to "the citizens of this country."

It's a dangerous, demagogic logic. And you know the Bush administration is in trouble if they're deploying it against firefighters who want to help hurricane victims. Next up -- Tom Tomorrow's prediction: "you're with us, or you're with the weather!"

"What didn't go right?"

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's Nancy Pelosi claiming that President Bush is even more clueless and out-of-touch than we thought:

At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had "absolutely no credentials."

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

"He said 'Why would I do that?'" Pelosi said.

"'I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'"

"Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she added.

Presidential medals of freedom all around!

"Problem solvers"

The latest excuse for not firing failed horse association executive and FEMA director Michael Brown:

Mr. Bush also resisted renewed calls to fire Michael D. Brown, the director of FEMA, who became a lightning rod for attacks last week when he said he was unaware of a crisis at the New Orleans convention center, news of which had been televised for days. Instead, Mr. Bush accused critics of playing the "blame game" and said he would remain focused on the immediate crisis as evacuees fanned out across the country.

"We've got to solve problems; we're problem-solvers," he said. "There will be ample time for people to figure out what went right and what went wrong. What I'm interested in is helping save lives."

We can all agree -- the problem of not having enough firefighters in the background for President Bush's photo-ops has been solved. Everything else... well, not so much.

Update 9/7: Here's an example of Bush administration "problem solving" from CNN via Wonkette:

A South Carolina health official said his colleagues scrambled Tuesday when FEMA gave only a half-hour notice to prepare for the arrival of a plane carrying as many as 180 evacuees to Charleston.

But the plane, instead, landed in Charleston, West Virginia, 400 miles away.

Don't worry, though - Bush is going to investigate his own failure to adequately deal with Katrina!

The political fallout from Katrina

What will the political effects of Katrina be?

Fred Barnes, always eager to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, touts an ABC News poll supposedly showing Bush won't be hurt much by Katrina in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today:

Americans break along normal partisan lines in judging Mr. Bush's performance in coping with Katrina, an ABC News poll found. Only a minority (44%) fault him personally. Even so, his approval rating may slip a bit.

However, that poll was conducted on Sept. 2, the day after Katrina hit. At that point, the full scope of the government's failure to address the situation in New Orleans wasn't entirely clear. And, as Mystery Pollster points out, a poll conducted in only one night will have a lower response rate and therefore may not be fully representative of the public at large (the other polls that are available are also less than ideal -- see MP for more).

In short, we don't know yet about the long-term effects of Katrina politically, which could be much more damaging for Bush than Barnes allows, especially since many Republicans have acknowledged that the response to the hurricane was a failure, which will cue party faithful that the President really did screw up. Later this week, when new conventional polls are released, we'll know a lot more.

Update 9/7: More on problems with the ABC News poll here.

The Bush White House: PR first, last, always

This Josh Marshall post is so disturbing and indicative of a larger problem that I want to reproduce it in full:

On the Al Franken show this afternoon I mentioned this article from today's Salt Lake Tribune which tells the story of about a thousand firefighters from around the country who volunteered to serve in the Katrina devastation areas. But when they arrived in Atlanta to be shipped out to various disaster zones in the region, they found out that they were going to be used as FEMA community relations specialists. And they were to spend a day in Atlanta getting training on community relations, sexual harassment awareness, et al. This of course while life and death situations were still the order of the day along a whole stretch of the Gulf Coast.

It's an article you've really got a to read to appreciate the full measure of folly and surreality.

But the graf at the end of the piece really puts everything in perspective, and gives some sense what the Bush administration really has in mind when it talks about a crisis. The paper reports that one team finally was sent to the region ...

As specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

You can't make this stuff up.

The part of government that actually governs can't figure out how to use 1,000 highly skilled firefighters, but the spin machine will put them right to work!