Brendan Nyhan

No substantive reply from Brooks

When I criticized a David Brooks column last week, Matthew Yglesias linked to it and then noted the problem it highlights with the op-ed format:

Brendan Nyhan gears up for battle with David Brooks' anti-neo-populism and he's backed up with a whole bunch of charts.

This is a reminder, I think, of why we should look forward to the day when the op-ed column is a dead format and everyone just blogs. Brooks' original column would, obviously, have been better if it -- like Nyhan's reply -- had come with links to data and charts. What's more, it'd be good if we could expect Brooks to reply to the sort of criticisms he's getting from Nyhan, Dean Baker, and others. Maybe he has something fascinating to say on his own behalf. But the way the columnizing world works, there's almost no chance he'll address his next column to trying to rebut the critics of this one. But a back-and-forth debate on this subject with links and charts and data would be much more interesting than what we're going to get instead where liberals decide Brooks is a liar and Brooks remains convinced that liberals are crazy.

And I wasn't the only one -- many other bloggers questioned the claims that Brooks made.

However, just as Yglesias predicted, Brooks has failed to address most substantive criticisms of his last column. Instead, he ran only this clarification at the end of his column today:

Last week I cited data on rising earnings among the working poor. I should have made it clear that the data referred to poor households with children, since poor households without children did not enjoy those gains.

It's true that Brooks failed to make clear that his quotation from this Ron Haskins op-ed pertained to earnings for poor families with children. I'm glad he clarified the point.

However, the larger problem is that Brooks claimed "earnings for the poorest fifth of Americans are also on the increase" and then cited the Haskins quote on gains between 1991 and 2005, a formulation that implies earnings are "on the increase" now. In fact, income hasn't really been "on the increase" for this group since President Bush took office, as the report (PDF) that Haskins was citing made clear in this graph:

In particular, the bottom quartile of families with children has seen their earnings tail off particularly dramatically during this period.

Shouldn't these points (and the similar problems with the first claim in his column) be clarified? Unfortunately, being a Times columnist means never having to admit that you might be wrong...

Bush and Brown in "Golf Cart One"

Via my officemate MCB, the New York Times has an amusing picture of George W. Bush and Gordon Brown riding in "Golf Cart One":

I'll open the caption contest in comments.

Update 7/30 9:15 PM: Wonkette, which picked up the post, has many more caption suggestions in comments.

Limbaugh's latest anti-dissent agitprop

Via Andrew Sullivan, Rush Limbaugh is again suggesting that Democrats want to lose the war in Iraq and the war on terror and are on the side of Osama bin Laden:

You look at the Democrat Party, look at their leaders and how they are trying to secure defeat in Iraq and secure defeat in the war on terror.

...You know, how do we know which side John Kerry is on in this war, folks? In the last war, Vietnam, he was with the enemy. He met with them. He lied for them before a Senate committee, and now here we have Senator Kerry downplaying the enemy's role in slaughtering Iraqis and downplaying their danger! We're the problem -- once again. So whose side is he on here? He's being very consistent, ladies and gentlemen. I'll tell you something else. This is absolutely hilarious. "Mr. Bin Laden's group" is how the New York Times refers to Al-Qaeda! (Lauging.) Why don't they just say, "Osama bin Laden, D-Afghanistan"? (Laughing.) Mr. Bin Laden's group? Osama bin Laden, D-Afghanistan. (Laughing.) Democrat, Afghanistan. Like Congressman William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana).

...On whose side is Senator Kennedy? Folks, I'm telling you, these people treating this not as a US national security issue. They're arguing with President Bush about that.

On Limbaugh's site, the transcript is accompanied by this graphic:

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates repudiated Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman's loathsome attack on Hillary Clinton as aiding enemy propaganda, but annoyingly reserved the right to smear dissent in the future:

I emphatically assure you that we do not claim, suggest or otherwise believe that Congressional oversight emboldens our enemies, nor do we question anyone’s motives in this regard. My statements to this effect have been frequent and unambiguous. That said, we all recognize that there are multiple audiences for what we say, and need to be careful not to undermine the morale of our troops or encourage our enemies — the point I think Ambassador Edelman was trying to make in his letter.

(For more, see our coverage at Spinsanity on Limbaugh and attacks on dissent and my blog posts on Limbaugh and attacks on dissent.)

Why are Iraq "right decision" numbers up?

With no significant evidence of progress in Iraq, why are poll numbers up for whether we made the right decision to invade? Here's a New York Times Week in Review article on the puzzle:

The Times and CBS News conducted a poll from July 9 to July 17 with 1,554 adults, mostly about Hillary Clinton...

In the poll, The Times and CBS News posed a standard question that asks respondents to think back to the invasion. Specifically, the poll asked: “Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the United States have stayed out?”

Forty-two percent of those polled said the United States did the right thing, and 54 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq. The last time the question was asked, in May, 35 percent said taking military action against Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out.

The July numbers represented a change. It was counterintuitive. None of the other war-related questions showed change. Mr. Bush’s approval rating had not changed. Nor had approval of his handling of Iraq. The level of support for Mr. Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq — the “surge” — was about the same as it had been in past polls. Support for the decision to go to war had risen modestly and nothing else in the poll could explain it.

A Newsweek poll conducted July 11-12 had a similar finding for the same question. But the magazine had not asked its question since December, so it is hard to know whether its current reading measured any recent change.

...When the second round of results came back, the numbers were nearly identical to the ones found in the poll about Mrs. Clinton. In the poll conducted last weekend with 889 adults, 42 percent of the respondents said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, and 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out.

There was also a drop in the number of people who said the war was going badly. In the latest poll, 66 percent of Americans said things were going badly for the United States in its efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq. That is down from 76 percent who said the same thing in May.

Here is a plot of the "right decision" numbers over time, which shows that Republicans, Democrats and independents all ticked upward:

I can't come up with a convincing explanation -- can you? (One possibility, of course, is that it's a statistical artifact, but the fact that three polls have all shown an increase for the same question suggests that it's not.)

The strange world of book reviews

Bizarrely, the New York Times published a review today of Bob Shrum's book No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner, which was released on June 5. I can understand late reviews of sleepers like The Kite Runner that take a while to gain recognition, but Shrum's book got a lot of press attention from the beginning. So why review it now?

Postscript: I did learn from the review that "the networks declined to show footage of Kerry at an Iowa party jokingly miming a toke while Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary sang 'Puff the Magic Dragon'" during the 2004 campaign. That's great -- who cares? -- but it's surprising given the media's apparently endless appetite for trivia. We're talking about a press corps that gave extensive coverage to the fact that Kerry ordered Swiss cheese on his cheesesteak during a campaign stop in Philadelphia. Is that "news" supposed to be more substantive than a joke about pot?

Robert Samuelson fails first grade math

Even philosophy major Matthew Yglesias is offended by the mathematical failings of Robert Samuelson, who writes that "If you move to a home 25 percent larger and then increase energy efficiency 25 percent, you don't save energy." But as Yglesias points out, 1.25*.75=.9375, which is less than 1. Ouch.

PS Yglesias later noted that "irrespective of mathematical quibbling, Samuelson's gotten the physics of home energy use wrong. Energy usage should grow proportionately to the surface area of your house, not to its volume."

The sounds of silence on Spitzer

The liberal blogosphere has been very quiet about the predicament of NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who seems determined to create an awkward parallel to the White House:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer vowed on Wednesday to fight any State Senate inquiry into his administration’s internal operations, even as Republican senators were laying the groundwork for an investigation that could lead to subpoenas of top officials.

Sound familiar?

The myth of the "Do-Nothing Congress"

Did you know the famous "Do Nothing Congress" of 1947-1948 actually accomplished a great deal? I didn't. When I interviewed him for my dissertation, National Journal's Carl Cannon pointed me to this piece of his (NJ sub. req.), which debunks the myth:

By 1948, while running for his own election, Truman denounced his rivals as the "Do-Nothing" Congress. Actually, the 80th Congress created the Air Force, the CIA, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and funded every element of the Truman Doctrine, including the Marshall Plan. "It's astounding the things that Congress accomplished," says congressional scholar Michael Robinson, co-author of an account of the 80th Congress. "It's a complete crock to call it a 'Do-Nothing' Congress. And Truman knew it."

But Truman also knew that despite the significant accomplishments of the 80th Congress, many Americans had concluded that with their myriad investigations and oversight hearings, Republicans had overindulged their partisan impulses, giving credence to accusations of gridlock.

"Even though they did so much, there were a lot of partisan clashes, and oversight-type investigations that went too far," congressional expert Norman Ornstein says. "The lesson here is that except in the most extraordinary circumstances, Congress cannot stage a confrontation with the president and win."

Democrats of the present day, beware...

Kimberley Strassel on "truth"

The latest in conservative postmodernism -- WSJ's Kimberley Strassel defines "truth" as what White House officials tell Congress in private not under oath:

Mr. Conyers, of course, has yet another honorable option: to take up the White House on its offer of making top officials available for questioning in private, and not under oath. If it's truth he's after, Mr. Bush has offered to give it to him.

Of course, the Attorney General won't even tell the truth when testifying in public under oath, but what is "truth" anyway?

The lame debate over Michael Moore's "Sicko"

My friend and former Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz and I have written a new column for the site on the debate over Michael Moore's "Sicko." Here's how it begins:

The mainstream media has started fact-checking Michael Moore one movie too late.

As veteran fact-checkers of Michael Moore, we should be taking a victory lap in the wake of "Sicko." The liberal icon's latest film has been aggressively fact-checked by major outlets including CNN's Sanjay Gupta, the Associated Press, and USA Today.

However, the media has decided to pounce on Moore just when he seems to be addressing his problems with accuracy. As a result, they have little to say -- indeed, the weakness of the criticism makes Moore look thoughtful and careful with his facts by comparison.

Please make sure to read the whole thing.

NYT op-ed fails Civics 101

No one understands that it takes sixty votes to pass non-budget legislation in the Senate because of the filibuster. Apparently this ignorance extends to the editors of the New York Times op-ed page, who let Jean Edward Smith write the following in a piece about changing the number of seats on the Supreme Court:

If the current five-man majority persists in thumbing its nose at popular values, the election of a Democratic president and Congress could provide a corrective. It requires only a majority vote in both houses to add a justice or two.

No, it requires sixty votes, and no Republican will ever vote for such a plan. Hence, court-packing is unlikely to happen again unless one party secures a filibuster-proof Senate majority. In short, the premise of the piece (that such a change is feasible) is false.

The futility of speculating about motives

Matthew Yglesias makes a crucial point that all pundits should take to heart:

I spent a lot of time puzzling over Bush's sincerity or lack thereof with regard to his idealistic rhetoric before the war, and in retrospect it was all wasted time. It's interesting to wonder how it's possible -- or if it's possible -- for a man to speak grand words about liberty in the morning and defending systematic torture in the afternoon, but it's not actually relevant. The main point was that there was simply never any good reason to believe the more idealistic aspiration sometimes associated with the war had any decent prospects of success...

It's ultimately futile to have a debate about motives or sincerity. You can't prove that someone has acted in bad faith. That's why we bracketed the word "lie," which implies motive, in All the President's Spin. Regardless of what he intends at any given moment, which we can never know with certainty, Bush's statements are frequently misleading. As the President, it's his duty not to mislead the public. Therefore, his actions are wrong.

There's a comparable lesson in the debate over John Ashcroft's confirmation as Attorney General, which I wrote about for Spinsanity in 2001. As I pointed out, defenders of Ashcroft shifted the focus of the debate from his inflammatory public statements about race to his (unprovable) feelings about race by claiming his critics were calling him a racist:

This rhetorical trick left Ashcroft's opponents reeling. By most accounts, Ashcroft is a decent person who does not personally hate people on the basis of race - and no one can definitively prove otherwise (hence President Bush: "This is a good man; he's got a good heart"). But this does not mean that Ashcroft should be exempt from criticism for capitalizing on racial animus and being indifferent to civil rights in his political career...

In the end, Ashcroft's supporters created a standard that is effectively insurmountable, precluding race-related criticism of the more ambiguous political appeals, statements and positions that constitute the vast majority of American politics...

Ezra Klein, unfortunately, has not fully internalized this point, though he converged to it asymptotically on Tuesday.

When he first wrote about the misleading David Brooks column that I criticized, Klein spent much of the post questioning whether Brooks is writing in good faith:

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are always telling me to cut David Brooks more slack, to extend the assumption of good faith, to listen to the interesting things he has to say. So I'd really like one of them to dissolve my current impression that Brooks' latest column -- which tries to make the argument that the economy really is in very good shape, save for some issues with inequality -- isn't a pack of lies and deceptions..

These are serious qualms and, if not factually rebutted, they call into question the accuracy of Brooks' article. Which isn't to say that there aren't answers to these objection. But readers deserve to have them. And without them, it's hard to extend that presumption of good faith. Particularly with pieces like this one providing past context.

After linking to my piece, he reiterated this concern:

But this is Brooks' main dodge in the article: He repeatedly factors in gains created during the final years of the 90s, averages them out with the losses during the Bush years, and uses the resultant positive number as proof that the economy is doing well. The actual conclusion this data suggests is that the economy was doing well and has been in decline for most of the last decade -- but that doesn't fit the story Brooks is trying to tell, which is that all those worried about the economy and intent on restoring (and possibly even enhancing) the progressivity of the Clinton years are mendacious alarmists. So again, someone explain to me how to read this in good faith.

A third post again questions Brooks' motivations:

Now why would David Brooks want to use such an inaccurate and even misleading measure? Particularly when median household income shows a 3% fall between 2000 and 2004? And has completely divorced itself from productivity gains? Doesn't Brooks find any of that worth mentioning?

In his final post, however, Klein finally concedes that we can't know Brooks' intent for sure and that we should instead focus on the effect of his column:

I want to emphasize, again, that this article is dishonest and misleading, in effect if not intent. I'm perfectly willing to believe some rightwing Heritage type impressed a perfectly well-intentioned David Brooks with these points at a party, but either way, the resulting article served to deceive readers of the New York Times op-ed page as to the state of the economy.

This is the correct position. Let's not waste our time and energy worrying about Brooks' motivations. Instead, focus on the stronger claim that his column was objectively misleading to Times readers and does not fulfill his obligations to them as a columnist.

Update 7/27 11:46 AM: After approvingly citing my original post on Brooks, Ross Douthat makes a similar point about the assumption of bad faith:

I think the liberal critics are right, and Brooks' use of the data in these two examples deserves criticism and correction.

Whether that justifies calling him a "liar," or whether it might be more appropriate to treat him the way I would assume Ezra would like to be treated himself - as a fallible pundit who is sometimes insufficiently skeptical about information that dovetails with his preconceptions, and who merits respectful disagreement in such cases rather sneering and name-calling - well, make up your own mind.

Boehner: No free will on SCHIP

According to House Republican leader John A. Boehner, offering SCHIP coverage that is superior to available private insurance options amounts to "[d]ragging people out of private health insurance":

Top House Republicans objected to the House Democrats’ plan to finance their proposals, with increases in tobacco taxes and cuts in subsidies for private health plans serving older Americans on Medicare. Republicans say public coverage would in some cases replace private insurance.

“Dragging people out of private health insurance to put them into a government-run program is ‘Hillary care’ come back,” Mr. Boehner said, referring to the Clinton administration plan for universal coverage.

Apparently, free will doesn't exist when it comes to choosing health insurance for children. Tie me to the mast! Don't let me be tempted into government coverage!

(Of course, designing SCHIP expansion so that it covers currently uninsured children rather than displacing existing private coverage is a real issue. But no one is being "dragged" out of private insurance.)

How is Gonzales still Attorney General?

Among all the norms that the Bush administration has overturned, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's repeated refusal to answer a direct question in Senate testimony without invoking executive privilege or the Fifth Amendment might be the most outrageous yet.

Josh Marshall has the story:

In this exchange Sen. Schumer (D) asks Gonzales who sent him and Andy Card to John Ashcroft's bedside. And Gonzales just refuses to answer. He keep repeating that they went "on behalf" of the president. But he won't say if the president sent them. He just won't answer.

Schumer notes the key point: Gonzales isn't even asserting any kind of privilege. He doesn't say he can't remember. He just won't answer...

It really requires stepping back in this case to take stock of this exchange. Testifying before Congress is like being called to testify in court. You have to answer every question. Every question. You can fudge and say you don't remember something and see how far you get. Or you can invoke various privileges. And it up to the courts to decide if the invocations are valid. But it's simply not permitted to refuse to answer the question. It is quite literally contempt of Congress.

How is this man still the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?

Conservative editorials attacking Iraq dissent

In the wake of the attack on Hillary Clinton by Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, two major conservative editorial pages have published editorials suggesting that supporters of withdrawal from Iraq are treasonous and support genocide.

First, the New York Post published an editorial titled "Comforting the enemy" that suggested Clinton's focus is on "undermining [the] mission" of US troops:

Comforting the enemy

Don't be misled by the outraged tone of Sen. Hillary Clinton's response to a top Pentagon aide who accused her of "reinforcing enemy propaganda" on Iraq. The Democratic presidential front-runner was handed a political opportunity - and is milking it for all it's worth.

The fact is, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman was on the mark in his attack. Asked by Clinton about plans for withdrawing troops from Iraq, he wrote in reply:

"Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia."

It's difficult to argue with that - especially the part about "public discussion."

...Clinton responded with a public display of mock outrage, insisting Defense Secretary Robert Gates declare whether he agrees with Edelman's letter. Taken as a whole, it's hard to see why Gates would take issue with it.

The focus in Washington should be on helping the troops - not on undermining their mission...

In addition, the Washington Times ran an editorial titled "The genocide-ocrats?" suggesting Democrats "plan to milk defeatism," accusing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of attempting "to damage the war effort," and calling Clinton "invested in defeat":

The genocide-ocrats?

Although the Senate's refusal on Wednesday to permit the Democratic leadership to attach a surrender timeline to the defense authorization is welcome news, congressional Democrats remain convinced that opposing the war is a politically popular position, and they plan to milk defeatism for all it's worth...

The failure of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's latest attempt to damage the war effort gives our soldiers and diplomats in essence a two-month reprieve until Gen. David Petraeus delivers his much-awaited report on the situation. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that things will change dramatically one way or the other in the next few months...

Yet Mrs. Clinton is apparently so invested in defeat that she has been trying to browbeat the Defense Department into publicly discussing contingency plans for withdrawing from Iraq. After she sent a letter on the subject to DoD, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded by warning bluntly that premature discussion of withdrawal "reinforces enemy propaganda" that the United States will abandon our allies in Iraq — as we previously did in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kerry responded by introducing legislation requiring a Pentagon briefing on an Iraq pullout — in other words advertising U.S. willingness to abandon another ally. For the record, here's the way Osama bin Laden characterized Mrs. Clinton's husband's ignominious withdrawal from Somalia in an October 2001 interview with CNN: "America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing. America left faster than anyone expected." Now, Mrs. Clinton is apparently hoping to stage a repeat performance in Iraq.

David Brooks omits context on economy

David Brooks is pulling out all the conservative pundit tricks in this passage from his column today:

If you’ve paid attention to the presidential campaign, you’ve heard the neopopulist story line. C.E.O.’s are seeing their incomes skyrocket while the middle class gets squeezed. The tides of globalization work against average Americans while most of the benefits go to the top 1 percent.

This story is not entirely wrong, but it is incredibly simple-minded. To believe it, you have to suppress a whole string of complicating facts.

The first complicating fact is that after a lag, average wages are rising sharply. Real average wages rose by 2 percent in 2006, the second fastest rise in 30 years.

The second complicating fact is that according to the Congressional Budget Office, earnings for the poorest fifth of Americans are also on the increase. As Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution noted recently in The Washington Post, between 1991 and 2005, “the bottom fifth increased its earnings by 80 percent, compared with around 50 percent for the highest-income group and around 20 percent for each of the other three groups.”

Brooks later claims that "the Democratic campaign rhetoric is taking on a life of its own, and drifting further away from reality... [C]andidates now compete to tell dark, angry and conspiratorial stories about the economy."

Another way to frame this might be to say that pundits compete to tell optimistic, context-free fables about the state of the economy.

The first trick that Brooks uses is to present an out-of-context statistic that sounds promising about the state of the economy under Bush, the same technique used by, for instance, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, NRO's Jerry Bowyer, and the administration (here and here).

He writes that "after a lag, average wages are rising sharply. Real average wages rose by 2 percent in 2006, the second fastest rise in 30 years." But the "lag" Brooks briefly mentions means that workers haven't gained much during the current expansion -- here's what real average wages look like since 1993, for instance:

In general, the current recovery does not compare well to the post-WWII average (or the 1990s), as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out:

Brooks's second claim is also misleading. In it, he uses the gains made under President Clinton to make the status of the poor look better than it is, writing that "according to the Congressional Budget Office, earnings for the poorest fifth of Americans are also on the increase." He then cites statistics for the 1991-2005 period.

However, if you actually look up the CBO report in question (PDF), you'll find this graphic, which illustrates that income hasn't really been "on the increase" for the lowest quintile of households with children under Bush:

The earnings gains that Brooks highlights have tailed off particularly dramatically under Bush:

Of course, it is true that the economic situation is complicated. But Brooks is giving short shrift to concerns about an economy that is currently doing very little for most Americans.

Update 7/31 8:56 AM: Brooks ran this clarification today:

Last week I cited data on rising earnings among the working poor. I should have made it clear that the data referred to poor households with children, since poor households without children did not enjoy those gains.

No word, however, on the larger issues with his column.

A strangely inept Bush soundbite on SCHIP

President Bush's soundbite on why he opposes SCHIP expansion is strangely inept:

President Bush has threatened to veto what he sees as a huge expansion of the children’s health care program, which he describes as a step “down the path to government-run health care for every American.”

It's funny to denounce your opponents for taking a step toward "health care for every American." Not universal health care! Nooooo!

Of course, Bush is trying to scare people by using the phrase "government-run health care," which implies (falsely) that Americans would be in a government-operated system. In fact, SCHIP is a program that offers health coverage through the states to children in relatively low-income families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. (See this CBPP analysis for more on the administration's misleading claims.)

Still, this seems like a case where Bush's sincere ideological opposition to expanding government coverage led him to blurt out the truth -- he really doesn't want health care for every American if it means the coverage is provided by the government.

Wacky Cindy Sheehan hijinks

Dana Milbank catalogues the wackiness of Cindy Sheehan.

How outside the mainstream is Sheehan? Even left-wingers have ostracized her:

The left-wing Daily Kos Web site banned her postings because of her challenge to Pelosi. Britain's Guardian newspaper, which has a large antiwar following, ran an article titled "The epic narcissism of Cindy Sheehan."

How strange is her understanding of reality? She claimed impeachment is mandated under the Constitution:

"If Nancy Pelosi doesn't do her constitutionally mandated job by midnight tonight, tomorrow I will announce that I am going to run against her," Sheehan announced outside the cemetery's gates yesterday. "I will beat her in California."

Sheehan then waded into constitutional law, and the little- known mandatory impeachment clause. "Impeachment is not a fringe movement -- it is mandated in our Constitution," she asserted. "Nancy Pelosi had no authority to take it off the table. If she takes impeachment off the table, what else will she take off the table -- the First Amendment?"

How paranoid is Sheehan?

[B]y yesterday Sheehan even thought the planes departing from National Airport were conspiring against her. "They stepped up the air traffic," she complained as a jet interrupted her speech.

If you're interested, Milbank made an accompanying video report on Sheehan's protest march in Washington yesterday. It features a man with a President Bush mask and a devil suit as well as a Free Republic protester yelling about "sex, drugs, and Geritol."

Romney and the "Obama Osama" sign

Given the long history of Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11, it's not encouraging to see Mitt Romney posing with an "Obama Osama" sign (via TPM):

The best part, though, is the Romney campaign's claim that the sign was "an alliterative play on words" that wasn't "equating or comparing anyone" (via Matthew Yglesias). Right.

(Note: This episode fits into the recent Romney campaign pattern of trying to stir up the base. Along the same lines, he recently compared Hillary Clinton to Karl Marx and accused Barack Obama of advocating sex education for children in kindergarten.)

The pro-Obama spammers

The endlessly creative spammers are now using Barack Obama to try to steal your money:

If you click through on the email, you get taken to a site (no link for obvious reasons) registered to someone in France that tries to charge you $1-2 to be added to the "petition wall."

Fox guest cites "24" as evidence

Media Matters catches former NYPD detective Bo Dietl citing the fictional TV show "24" as evidence of the terrorist threat during a guest appearance on Fox News:

The fact of the matter is -- I mean, you don't watch 24 on Fox TV? They're out there. They're out there. There are cells out there. We have to protect ourselves against it, as Americans, and you know something, if you're on a plane with me, Hassan, and you're sitting next to me, you'll be looked at a little careful -- more carefully than me. That's the facts of life. That's what we're living with today. I'm sorry to say, 9-11 changed our whole life.

Sadly, Diehl is following in the footsteps of a Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, who cited "24" in a discussion of torture last month. It's yet another example of the trend toward conservative postmodernism...

PS Here's the appropriate response: "We're in danger of invasion by robots from outer space. Didn't you see 'Transformers'?" Fox bookers, put me on the air!

Most insipid campaign article yet?

News I can't use -- the New York Times reports on John McCain's "gay sweater":

When Senator John McCain’s campaign went into a midflight stall last week, it was not only the candidate’s hard-line stance on Iraq or problems with his party’s conservative wing that enthralled the thumb-tapping hordes of the blogosphere. It was leaks from inside the campaign alleging that Mr. McCain thought his handlers were dressing him up as a metrosexual.

Political blogs like the Stump and the Swamp, and gossipier ones like Radar, had a field day with Mr. McCain’s so-called “gay sweater,” a V-neck worn over a T-shirt. Fashion insiders, for their part, shrugged off the look as more appropriate to the buffet line at an assisted living center than the pages of Out.

As my friend Ben Fritz says, "Did somebody tell the NYT editors that the articles about Obama playing basketball and the Clintons' marriage were too heavy and substantive?"

Indeed, the article raises a serious question -- what is the most insipid article on the 2008 campaign thus far? Here are my nominees (please suggest other contenders in comments):

-The NYT on McCain's "gay sweater"
-The Post on Hillary Clinton's cleavage
-The Post investigation of John Edwards's haircuts
-The NYT on how Obama plays basketball

What do you think?

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The crack Bush 41 administration

Here's a confidence-inspiring anecdote about the current Secretary of Defense from Evan Thomas's review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA:

Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Robert M. Gates, who is now the secretary of defense but at the time was the first President Bush’s top intelligence adviser, was at a family picnic. A friend of his wife’s joined the picnic and asked him, “What are you doing here?” Gates asked, “What are you talking about?” “The invasion,” she said. “What invasion?” he asked.

In the age of Bush 43, people sometimes get wistful for the supposed competence of his father's administration. Maybe they're getting a little carried away...

Update 7/23 2:12 PM: Bruce Bartlett shares a related anecdote in comments:

I had a similar Bush 41 experience. A few days before the election in 1992 I ran into Charlie Black at the local supermarket. At the time, Charlie was one of Bush's top campaign aides. I asked him what he was doing food shopping with his wife when Bush was fighting for his political life? He just shrugged his shoulders while his wife giggled. I knew then, with absolute certainty, that Bush would lose the election.

New Iraq doc: No End in Sight

James Fallows, who wrote Blind Into Baghdad, is recommending No End In Sight, a new documentary on the war in Iraq:

Next week Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by "select other cities." It is worth making time to see this film.

...My deeper bias might seem to work against the film. It covers almost exactly the same terrain, including many of the same sources and anecdotes, as did my book Blind Into Baghdad. But rarely have I seen a clearer demonstration of how much more powerful the combination of pictures, sound, music, real-people-talking, etc can be than words on a page. (Update: I'm not denigrating print, to which I've devoted my professional life -- and which, indeed, is the medium through which big ideas about the world are generally changed. But there are times when the experience of seeing, for instance, chaos on the streets of Baghdad transcends any mere verbal description of it.)

I don't know whether the highly-publicized Sicko is any good: hasn't shown up in the pirate-video stores here yet. But if you're looking for an auteur-produced, both intellectually and emotionally powerful, public-affairs-related documentary film, I say: try this one first.

Here's the preview:

Decline of civilization watch: Robin Givhan

Yes, Robin Givhan wrote an entire Washington Post article on Hillary Clinton's cleavage.

The Pentagon smears Hillary

In the latest post-9/11 attack on dissent, a Pentagon undersecretary has accused Hillary Clinton of reinforcing enemy propaganda for requesting information about US plans for eventual withdrawal from Iraq. Here's the AP account (see also the letter itself):

The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda.

In a stinging rebuke to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded to questions Clinton raised in May in which she urged the Pentagon to start planning now for the withdrawal of American forces.

..."Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," Edelman wrote.

He added that "such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.

My updated timeline of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11 is posted below the jump. (If I'm missing anything from the last few months, please let me know.)

Why Bush will drag down the GOP

Ron Brownstein provides the most convincing argument I've seen for why Bush is likely to devastate the GOP's fortunes in 2008:

when a departing president has been as unpopular as Bush is now, his party has usually lost the White House in the next election.

There's no guarantee that history will repeat itself. But the weight of experience suggests that Republicans in Congress and in the presidential race are vastly underestimating the challenge of escaping the undertow Bush is creating. If he cannot recover at least somewhat, or if the party does not separate itself from him more effectively — or both — the GOP may be dragged under.

In the elections to replace departing presidents, weakness seems more contagious than strength. Outgoing presidents with a high job approval rating haven't always succeeded in passing on the White House to their chosen candidates. Ronald Reagan did in 1988, but, in two nail-biting contests, Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 and Bill Clinton in 2000 could not.

Unpopular departing presidents, though, have consistently undercut their party in the next election. Democrats lost the White House in 1952 and 1968 after Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson saw their approval ratings plummet below 50%. Likewise, in the era before polling, the opposition party won the White House when deeply embattled presidents left office after the elections of 1920 (Woodrow Wilson), 1896 (Grover Cleveland), 1860 (James Buchanan) and 1852 (Millard Fillmore). The White House also changed partisan control when weakened presidents stepped down in 1844 and 1884. Only in 1856 and 1876 did this pattern bend, when the parties of troubled presidents Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant held the White House upon their departure.

This shouldn't be shocking. Voters dissatisfied with a departing president typically want change. And they usually believe the opposition party will deliver more change than the president's. The most recent elections to replace retiring two-term presidents — Reagan in 1988 and Clinton in 2000 — help us quantify that instinct. In each case, media exit polls found that the same share — 88% — of voters who disapproved of the retiring president's job performance voted against his party's nominee, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000. By contrast, about four-fifths of voters who approved of the outgoing president's performance voted for his party's nominee each time.

Those are ominous numbers for Republicans today. On the day of the election to succeed them, both Reagan and Clinton enjoyed approval ratings just over 55%, with about 40% of voters disapproving. In last week's Gallup/USA Today poll, Bush's approval rating stood at just 29%, with 66% disapproving. If voters divide as they did in 1988 and 2000, and Bush's ratings do not improve, that would translate into a 2008 Democratic landslide. That's why Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz says flatly, "There is no way any Republican can win the presidential election next year if Bush's approval rating remains anywhere near where it is now."

In fact, to survive 2008, Republicans will probably need some combination of separation (from Bush) and rehabilitation (for him). But neither end of that equation will be easy. Bush's disapproval rating has exceeded 58% all year and has not fallen below 50% for two years — the longest stretch of such presidential weakness since Truman finished his second term beleaguered by Korea, corruption and Joe McCarthy.

It's true that Republicans in 2008 should perform slightly better among voters who disapprove of the president than George H.W. Bush and Gore did, because their nominee, unlike those men, won't be the retiring president's vice president. But another pattern underscores how hard the challenge will remain: On average, 80% of voters who disapproved of a president's performance have voted against his party's candidates even in House races since 1986, according to the respected University of Michigan post-election polls. When a president takes on water, in other words, everyone in his party flounders.

Susan Collins: Best no comment ever

Dana Milbank captures a classic no-comment by Susan Collins on the plight of her colleague David Vitter:

Though they ultimately rewarded his contrition with a standing ovation, some colleagues weren't sure they liked the smell of things, either. "I don't have any thoughts," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said of Vitter as she arrived. She reconsidered. "I have many thoughts," she revised. "They're just unexpressed." Did Vitter break the law? "I'm not an expert in prostitution law, I'm pleased to say," she replied.

You know things aren't going well when you have to clarify that you "have many thoughts."

Conference blog hiatus

I'm currently attending the summer meeting of the Society for Political Methodology in lovely State College, PA so blogging may be light through Sunday...

Yglesias: Bush "wants" sick kids to die

I'm sick of pundits flippantly accusing their opponents of wanting some potential bad outcome that could result from a policy position, as Matthew Yglesias does in this post (and yes, I recognize that it's supposed to be funny or ironic):

George Bush Wants Kids to Get Sick and Die

Just kidding. He'd like kids to stay healthy. It's just that if they get sick, he wants them to die. Thus, his plan to veto a bill expanding S-CHIP, a program to give health insurance to kids.

So I assume Yglesias would have no objection to Bush saying that supporters of withdrawal from Iraq want tens of thousands of people to die in the resulting chaos?

John McCain's glamorous (losing) campaign

Predictably, the wheels are falling off of John McCain's campaign (Intrade currently puts his probability of winning the GOP nomination at 4.3%), but at least he's going out in style:

In April, McCainiacs gathered at the Tabú Ultra Lounge in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. His finance reports say that he paid the club $18,735 for "Equip Rental/Catering." The nightclub's Web site describes it this way: "Interactive projections mesmerize with sensual images. Internationally renowned DJs conjure a cool and casual vibe that put it on everyone's list of Las Vegas nightclubs. Stunning models/servers tempt with nouveau classic cocktails. This is the forbidden world of Tabú, where only one rule applies: anything goes. Are you ready for a nightspot that's too hot to touch?"

...On May 17, it was Tenjune, a club in New York City, for a Young Professionals cocktail reception hosted by his daughter Meghan. McCain paid the club $6,669 twice, for "Catering/Personnel SVC/Equip."

...The club's Web site features a picture of two women in a sensuous embrace.

"As you descend the main stairway, you enter the middle section with its soft, velvet seating and wood flooring," the site says. "Behind the bar, a marble wall twinkles with points of light. Overhead, wooden waves undulate across the ceiling with soft light spilling out between the ripples that continue into the dance room."

Return of the Obama inexperience meme

The meme that Barack Obama is inexperienced has come back with a vengeance.

Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch asserted recently that Obama "has a record of inexperience no other serious contender could match":

Consider a candidate like Barack Obama, who—well, there is no candidate like Barack Obama, who entered the race with a record of inexperience no other serious contender could match.

And as Matthew Yglesias notes, New York Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai made an even more sweeping claim yesterday, stating that Obama "would set a new precedent for inexperience in the White House":

Obama, who leads the field in financial contributions, would set a new precedent for inexperience in the White House; he was a state senator only three years ago, when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic convention, and before that he was a community organizer.

But as I've noted (here and here), Obama's tenure in elected office is comparable to most of the top presidential candidates. And as Yglesias notes, the historical claim is also unsupportable:

If Obama is elected to the White House, he will have served eight years in the Illinois State Senate and four years in the United States Senate. In the twentieth century, I count Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan as all having served fewer than 12 years in public office before assuming the Presidency and I count exactly twelve for Warren Harding. To find a President with as few as six years of public office under his belt before becoming President, you need to go all the way back to . . . the current President of the United States so it's not like you need to be a historian to figure this out.

Now arguably some of these people were "more experienced" than Obama along other metrics than a raw count of years would indicate, but there's still no obvious sense in which Obama is a precedent-shattering figure. At a minimum, Carter and Abraham Lincoln were unambiguously less experienced.

Bush's misleading Al Qaeda/Iraq rhetoric

Slowly, press outlets are starting to push back against President Bush's frequent misleading references to Al Qaeda as the enemy in Iraq.

The critical coverage began with McClatchy reporter Jonathan Landay, who wrote this on June 28:

Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts.

The reference, in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to al Qaida at least 27 times, seemed calculated to use lingering outrage over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster support for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq, despite evidence that sending more troops hasn't reduced the violence or sped Iraqi government action on key issues.

Bush called al Qaida in Iraq the perpetrator of the worst violence racking that country and said it was the same group that had carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

"Al Qaida is the main enemy for Shia, Sunni and Kurds alike," Bush asserted. "Al Qaida's responsible for the most sensational killings in Iraq. They're responsible for the sensational killings on U.S. soil."

U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to al Qaida are only a small fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as al Qaida in Iraq didn't exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn't pledge its loyalty to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden until October 2004 and isn't controlled by bin Laden or his top aides.

On July 8, the excellent new public editor for the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, who used to direct McClatchey's Washington bureau (formerly Knight Ridder), flagged the pattern and criticized the Times for failing to call Bush on it:

As domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away, President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al Qaeda.

Bush mentioned the terrorist group 27 times in a recent speech on Iraq at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. In West Virginia on the Fourth of July, he declared, “We must defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq.” The Associated Press reported last month that although some 30 groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi government targets, press releases from the American military focus overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda.

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

On July 10, Landay again noted Bush's misleading phrasing in a followup story:

Struggling to stem growing opposition to his Iraq policy even among Republicans, President Bush contended anew Tuesday that the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States are the same as al Qaida in Iraq, a violent Iraqi insurgent group that didn't exist until after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

It was the second time in two weeks that Bush has made the link in an apparent attempt to transform lingering fear of another U.S. terrorist attack into backing for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq.

"Al Qaida is doing most of the spectacular bombings, trying to incite sectarian violence," Bush told a business group in Cleveland, Ohio. "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims."

Al Qaida in Iraq didn't emerge until 2004. While it is inspired by Osama bin Laden's violent ideology, there's no evidence that the Iraq organization is under the control of the terrorist leader or his top aides, who are believed to be hiding in tribal regions of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

Moreover, the two groups have been divided over tactics and strategy.

While U.S. intelligence and military officials view al Qaida in Iraq as a serious threat, they say the main source of violence and instability is an ongoing contest for power between majority Shiites and Sunnis, who dominated Saddam Hussein's regime.

And on July 13, the Times news pages finally covered the story, writing a solid piece fact-checking Bush:

In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq,” he said, “were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home.”

It is an argument Mr. Bush has been making with frequency in the past few months, as the challenges to the continuation of the war have grown. On Thursday alone, he referred at least 30 times to Al Qaeda or its presence in Iraq.

But his references to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and his assertions that it is the same group that attacked the United States in 2001, have greatly oversimplified the nature of the insurgency in Iraq and its relationship with the Qaeda leadership.

There is no question that the group is one of the most dangerous in Iraq. But Mr. Bush’s critics argue that he has overstated the Qaeda connection in an attempt to exploit the same kinds of post-Sept. 11 emotions that helped him win support for the invasion in the first place.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sunni group thrived as a magnet for recruiting and a force for violence largely because of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which brought an American occupying force of more than 100,000 troops to the heart of the Middle East, and led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

Ironically, this is the same approach the White House took to selling the Iraq war in the first place, as Frank Rich pointed out yesterday in the New York Times:

The White House's game is to create a new fictional story line to keep the war going until President Bush can dump it on his successor. Bizarrely, some of the new scenario echoes the bogus narrative used to sell the war in 2002: an imaginary connection between Iraq and the attacks of 9/11. You'd think the Bush administration might think twice before recycling old lies, but things have gotten so bad in the bunker that even Karl Rove is repeating himself.

The White House also used the 9/11 link to defend the war after the US invasion (see All the President's Spin for more). So why has it taken reporters so long to catch on? How long until the rest of the press starts distinguishing between the real Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia?

Josh Marshall's evidentiary decline

Josh Marshall has recently fallen into the bad habit of asserting things he can't prove, including baseless or unsupported assertions like this one (my emphasis in bold):

A very revealing moment. For the first time the president was asked, now that all the legal stuff is over and there's nothing more pending, whether he was disappointed in the fact that a number of his top advisors were responsible for revealing the name of a covert CIA operative.

He couldn't even manage a perfunctory statement of disappointment or regret. He managed to slip in a dig at Rich Armitage, a general statement that the whole thing had been very rough on the White House staff and that now "we're" moving on.

Needless to say, the president was involved from day one. He was always in favor of doing it. And he basically said so again today. Truly a shameful man.

Note the leap to the conclusion that "the president was involved from day one" and "was always in favor of doing it [outing Valerie Plame]". Nothing Bush said today supports that claim, nor is there evidence in the public record that can back up either of those statements.

Over the last couple of years, Marshall has suggested that former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell helped steal the 2004 presidential election; asserted that the White House ordered Sen. Pat Roberts to investigate special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald; claimed that the White House "engineered" the timing of the verdict in Saddam Hussein's trial; and stated that the President was "a party to the same underlying crime" in the Scooter Libby case.

It's not OK to make serious accusations like these without the evidence to back them up, as Marshall knows.

Greg Mankiw and tax cut rhetoric

I'm quoted in a Harvard Crimson story on Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economics professor and former Bush administration economist:

N. Gregory Mankiw is not unfamiliar with the demands that come with being one of the foremost economists in the country.

After all, the Beren Professor of Economics survived a stint in the very public domain of Washington politics, serving as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors from 2003 to 2005. But now, he’s facing a new and perhaps even more public challenge—the wrath of online bloggers.

Several professors and economists have called on Mankiw to explain what they see as his changing views on tax cuts from before he began advising President George W. Bush to when he served as Bush’s top economic advisor.

According to an online blog post by Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, Mankiw had previously criticized certain supply-side arguments—namely, that lowering tax rates could actually generate more tax revenue—and then reversed his opinion while working in Washington.

But Mankiw said that he never made such a policy switch.

“[Bernstein] made a claim that I’d been inconsistent about the tax cuts and I don’t think I had been,” Mankiw said. “Being opposed to a tax cut as a policy and being critical of an argument for tax cuts are two different things.”

Mankiw clarified on his own online blog that he opposed only the supply-side argument for tax cuts but that he thought the 2003 Bush tax cuts were justified for other reasons—though he himself was not actually an advisor to the President when those tax cuts were implemented.

But Brendan J. Nyhan, a political science graduate student at Duke University and frequent blogger, points out that while Mankiw said he was “skeptical” of the claim that tax cuts could pay for themselves during his Senate confirmation hearing, Mankiw also denied that the administration had used “self-financing” arguments.

Nyhan then lists on his blog specific quotes from then-Press Secretary Ari Fleis[c]her, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President Bush, all of whom said in the early months of 2003 that the tax cuts would lead to more tax revenue.

“Mankiw failed to get the Bush administration to say things that were accurate about the effects of tax cuts on revenue and other economic issues,” Nyhan said. “That Mankiw is unwilling to acknowledge that the Bush administration made these claims is exemplary of White House experts who are unwilling to publicly contradict their bosses in the administration.”

J. Bradford Delong ’82, a prominent economist at UC Berkeley, also weighed in on the debate on his blog, questioning whether it is “worth the sacrifice of the economics profession’s outside credibility and the further confusion of the public that is entailed when good economists defend bad policies on the outside that they are working to change on the inside.”

No one outside the administration may ever know whether Mankiw privately advised Bush that the tax cuts would not be self-financing. But Mankiw announced in late 2006 that he had signed on as an advisor to the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and the Republican candidate seems to be employing these very same supply-side arguments.

“If you lower taxes enough, you create more growth,” Romney said in a video excerpt on his Web site from a closed-door presentation he made to the Club for Growth, a political organization that favors low taxes, in March 2007.

“And if you create growth, you get more jobs,” Romney continued. “You get more jobs, more people are paying taxes. You get more taxes paid, the government has more money by charging lower tax rates.”

It would appear that this is the very same argument for taxes that Mankiw has said he opposed.

Nyhan said that economists with ties to politicians need to be more honest with the public regarding their actual views, whether or not they clash with the prominent figures they’re advising.

“We need to drive this idea out of the mainstream, because it is not accurate,” Nyhan said.

Here are the links that are referenced in the piece:
-My Spinsanity piece on Mankiw's confirmation hearing claim
-The full timeline of Bush administration officials suggesting that tax cuts increase revenue
-The Romney video in which he states that tax cuts increase revenue (click on "On the Issues" then select "On Fighting for Lower Taxes")

It's especially sad to see that Romney -- who Mankiw advises -- is making these claims. After John McCain started saying that tax cuts increase revenue, Mankiw badmouthed McCain on his blog:

Senator McCain tells the National Review:

Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues.

The interviewer, however, did not ask the natural follow-up questions:

1. If you think the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts increased revenue, why did you vote against them?

2. If you think tax cuts increase revenue, why advocate spending restraint? Can't we pay for new spending programs with more tax cuts?

I doubt that, in fact, Senator McCain believes we are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. But unfortunately, fealty to the most extreme supply-side views is de rigeur in some segments of the Republican party.

It's a strange point for Mankiw to make. He has failed to acknowledge publicly that the Bush administration makes the same exact claims. In addition, I noted the apparent implication that Romney, whose campaign Mankiw had recently joined as an adviser, would not make similar claims. Judging by the quote above, however, the former Massachusetts governor is following McCain and Rudy Giuliani down the rabbit hole. Will Mankiw passively endorse this rhetoric again?

AP's illogic on Al Qaeda report

Why does the AP suggest that Al Qaeda's rebuilt operational capacity "could bolster the president's hand at a moment when support on Capitol Hill for the war is eroding and the administration is struggling to defend its decision for a military buildup in Iraq"? The report is titled "Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West" and seems to concern Al Qaeda the terrorist group, not the insurgent faction known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. And given that Bush's approval is at 27.7% and 62% of Americans now think that the invasion was a mistake, I'm not sure anything is going to strengthen the President's hand.

(PS I'm in DC doing interviews for my dissertation research before heading up to Massachusetts on Friday, so I may not get a chance to post again before the weekend. In the meantime, don't miss the lively debates in comments about "Sicko" and increasing the gas tax.)

Moore: "Everything...in 'Fahrenheit' was true"

After a mild fact-checking piece on "Sicko" by CNN's Sanjay Gupta, Michael Moore went on a long rant yesterday in which he claimed that "everything I said in 'Fahrenheit [9/11]' was true" (transcript, video):

And for me to come on here and have to listen to that kind of crap. I mean, seriously, I haven't been on your show now for three years. The last time I was on, you ran a similar piece about "Fahrenheit 9/11" saying this can't be true what he's saying about the war, how it's going to be a quagmire, the weapons of mass destruction.

You know, and -- why don't you start off actually with my first appearance back here on your show in three years and maybe apologize to me for saying that three years ago, because it turned out everything I said in "Fahrenheit" was true. Everything has come to happen.

Everything I said. I mean, I was -- I took you in that film to Walter Reed Hospital and it took three years before you or any of the rest of the mainstream media would go to Walter Reed Hospital and see what was happening to our troops. So for me to have to sit here and listen again to more crap about socialized medicine or how the Canadians have it worse than us and all this, all the statistics show that we have far worse healthcare than these other industrialized countries.

However, as we wrote on Spinsanity in 2004, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is actually "filled with a series of deceptive half-truths and carefully phrased insinuations that Moore does not adequately back up." Judging by initial reports, "Sicko" is somewhat less problematic (I haven't seen it yet), but you still should not trust anything that man says.

(Note: Moore disputes Gupta's piece on his website. I can't arbitrate without having seen the film, but the debate seems to be the result of conflicting sources of information and slight variations in statistics.)

Update 7/10 10:09 PM: Dean Baker, the co-director of Center for Economic and Policy Research and an American Prospect blogger, says Moore was right about current levels of health care spending in the US.

Why we need a Federal Reserve for gas taxes

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board expresses the common concern that a gas tax increase would not be offset by corresponding tax cuts, but would instead be consumed by increased government spending:

Speaking for ourselves, we don't favor a carbon tax. In theory, such a tax might make sense if it were offset by lower taxes on income tax rates and capital investment--which would be a net plus for economic growth. However, there's not a chance in melting Greenland that the current Congress would offset any new carbon taxes; it would merely pocket the extra revenue to permanently increase the government's share of GDP.

The solution, I've argued, is to create a Federal Reserve for gas taxes:

[T]he government's commitment to ensuring that people get a fair deal from a gas tax is not credible. Politicians have every incentive to take the extra revenues and put them toward more pork while taking back the accompanying tax cut over time. So why not have an independent Federal Reserve-type board of economists that's responsible for adjusting the tax cut to maximize fuel efficiency without creating economic dislocation? The board could also be responsible for creating a yearly tax rebate that could be administered separately from the normal income tax system. That way people would see the proceeds from the gas tax coming back to them in a transparent way.

Isn't this the only way to make the politics of a $1/gallon gas tax hike feasible?

NYT: How can anyone oppose more SCHIP?

New York Times reporter Robert Pear does solid work on the health care beat, but this passage betrays his sympathies in the debate over expanding government financing of health care insurance for children:

The fight over a popular health insurance program for children is intensifying, with President Bush now leading efforts to block a major expansion of the program, which is a top priority for Congressional Democrats.

The seemingly uncontroversial goal of insuring more children has become the focus of an ideological battle between the White House and Congress.

Here, "[s]eemingly uncontroversial" is code for "only unreasonable ideologues oppose it." I don't agree with the White House position on this, but it's not outside the boundaries of mainstream political debate:

White House objections to the Democratic plan are “philosophical and ideological,” said Allan B. Hubbard, assistant to the president for economic policy. In an interview, he said the Democrats’ proposal would move the nation toward “a single-payer health care system with rationing and price controls.”

The key is the distinction between means and ends. The goal of covering all children is almost universally shared, but liberals and conservatives disagree over whether the government should finance health insurance for uninsured children, particularly for those over the poverty line. Instead of acknowledging this philosophical disagreement over means, Pear's lede suggests that the White House opposes the goal of more coverage for children.

I don't agree with simplistic media bias claims, but this is an example of how liberal bias does creep in to reporting -- reporters often blur the distinction between opposition to government provision of services or funding and opposition to the goals of the programs.

The Edwards haircut graphic

I missed the stunning graphic that accompanied the Washington Post's investigation John Edwards's haircuts (via Bob Somerby):

It's everything that's wrong with political journalism in one handy clip 'n' save graphic. Keep it in your wallet! Show your friends!

Ron Paul: More $ than McCain?!

Today's man-bites-dog headline: ABC News is reporting that Ron Paul has more cash on hand than John McCain. In related news, the Intrade prediction market puts McCain's probability of winning at 5%, barely higher than Paul, who is (shockingly) at 2.4%.

newsobserver.com's biscuit-finding contest

Stupid newspaper website tricks:

Yes, the News & Observer (a newspaper based in Raleigh, NC) is trying to encourage readership of newsobserver.com by encouraging visitors to search the site for virtual dog biscuits. Weep for the future of the news media...

PS Browzer is a nice complement to my collection of wacky government animal mascots for kids, though (see here, here, and here).

Liberals: "Underlying crime" in Libby case

Like several commenters on my original Scooter Libby post, Josh Marshall is assuming the existence of an underlying crime that was protected by Libby's perjury:

Setting aside whether Scooter Libby should spend 0 days in jail for what most people spend from 1 to 3 years in jail, the key here is that it's inappropriate for the president to pardon or commute a sentence in a case in which he (i.e., the president) is a party to the same underlying crime. Because it amounts to obstruction of justice.

Note how quickly the tables have turned here. People (like Marshall) who bemoaned the guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude of Republicans during the Clinton years have now decided -- based on no hard evidence -- (a) there was an underlying crime and (b) that President Bush "is a party to" it. To believe this to be true, you have to believe that Richard Armitage innocently leaked Valerie Plame's status to Robert Novak before other Bush officials could unleash a plot that demonstrably violated the relevant statute. In addition, you have to believe that Libby's testimony would reveal this plot. While it's possible that all of this happened, assuming that it did is completely unreasonable.

Matthew Yglesias is more circumspect about the existence of an underlying crime, but still frames the issue in a "when did you stop beating your wife?" style:

Most of Libby's defenders -- George W. Bush, David Brooks, etc. -- don't seem to be denying that Libby committed a crime by lying under oath to investigators. They want us to say that, rather, he deserves to be treated very leniently because there was no big deal here. The alleged absence of an underlying crime is key to that theory. The converse theory is that there was an underlying crime and the crime can't be proven because Libby lied to investigators.

If that theory is wrong -- if there really was no crime -- then it seems we ought to get some kind of explanation from Libby as to why he lied. People sometimes do have reasons to lie to investigators other than a desire to cover up criminal activity (hiding non-criminal activity that's embarrassing is the obvious one) but if Libby wants mercy he should offer up a plausible score on this account. But Libby hasn't offered any such story... Maybe there was no crime here; but if there wasn't, then what was Libby doing? He's not even trying to convince us that he had some other reason to lie.

Libby is by all accounts a loyal servant. Couldn't he just be protecting his superiors from exposure of embarrassing but non-criminal conduct? In the end, we have no idea what happened. There is no proof of a criminal conspiracy. Asserting or speculating that one took place is irresponsible.

Update 7/6 10:37 AM: Yglesias concedes a great deal of ground in a response, changing the question from "Doesn't the absence of an explanation for Libby's conduct suggest the existence of an underlying crime?" (the subject of his previous post) to "Was Bush's decision to commute Libby's sentence an abuse of power?":

Brendan Nyhan criticizes liberals for simply assuming the existence of an underlying crime in the Scooter Libby case and sweeps my post here into that rubric, wondering of Libby "Couldn't he just be protecting his superiors from exposure of embarrassing but non-criminal conduct?" He certainly could. But let's assume that's true. Is "I broke the law to help my boss cover-up embarrassing but non-criminal conduct" a reasonable case for lenience? No. Is "he broke the law to help me cover-up embarrassing by non-criminal conduct" a reasonable case for granting someone clemency? Also no.

The bottom line is that on one theory -- Libby broke the law to spare his superiors embarrassing revelations of their lawbreaking, and is being pardoned by those same superiors to help perpetuate the cover-up of their embarrassing lawbreaking -- Libby deserves to go to jail and Bush has seriously abused his power by pardoning Libby. On Nyhan's alternative theory -- Libby broke the law to spare his superiors embarrassing revelations of their embarrassing non-criminal conduct, and is being pardoned by those same superiors to help perpetuate the cover-up of their embarrassing non-criminal conduct -- Libby also deserves to go to [jail] and Bush has also seriously abused his power by pardoning Libby.

This -- that the President of the United States is abusing his power in a serious way -- is a substantially more important issue than the question of whether Josh Marshall should be slightly more circumspect in his characterization of the serious abuses of power.

Actually, unsubstantiated assertions that the president of the United States participated in a criminal conspiracy are a pretty important issue. (Matt's liberal friends were pretty worked up about this issue a few years ago -- and rightly so.) In any case, despite my misgivings about the Libby case, I ultimately agree with Yglesias that Bush's decision was an abuse of power and I support the proposal he highlighted that would amend the Constitution to ban pardons and commutations for "executive-branch employees convicted of crimes carried out in the course of their professional duties."

Update 7/6 12:41 PM: Yglesias added the following update to his post:

UPDATE: See Brendan's update. Bottom-line, I think it's rock solid that Bush abused his power, and until someone can offer a plausible account of what kind of non-criminal conduct Libby is helping to cover-up, I'm not going to be too upset if people assume that what's being covered-up was, in fact, a crime. The fact that Bush is actively and openly participating in the cover-up (and there's no serious doubt that something is being covered-up) naturally whets one's suspicions. Bush and Cheney are, however, clearly entitled to a legal presumption of innocence.

I'll just add that many conservatives had many such "suspicions" about the reasons for alleged coverups of, say, Whitewater that turned out to be unfounded.

Update 7/7 10:32 AM: Conversely, as Media Matters points out, Robert Novak is incorrect to assert definitively that "there was no underlying crime." As a result of Libby's perjury and obstruction of justice, we don't know that for sure either.

Jerry Bowyer's analytical problems

Josh Marshall has posted a Fox News clip in which National Review Online's Jerry Bowyer tells Neil Cavuto that the United Kingdom's state-run health care system has made them vulnerable to terrorist infiltration:

In a followup post, he asks for details about Bowyer:

Can anyone tell me more about Jerry Bowyer from National Review Online? He's the guy in the video below who went on Fox today and chatted with Neil Cavuto about how having a single payer health care system will make us more vulnerable to terrorism. Where do they find these guys? Did I just not watch Fox closely enough in the past?

Is he on these shows a lot? Has anyone heard this argument before?

Since I've written quite a bit about Bowyer over the last few years, here are some excerpts from my posts on him, which show that he is, um, analytically challenged:

Supply-side nonsense from Jerry Bowyer (5/15/07)

In his latest effort, Bowyer once again claims that the Laffer curve has been vindicated and that tax cuts increase revenue, a claim that even Bush economists disavow...

...Note what's missing from Bowyer's account: the 2001 tax cut. Like the Treasury Department and the Wall Street Journal, Bowyer is cheating by focusing only on the period after the second Bush tax cut. That's the great thing about cutting taxes repeatedly: when the economy picks up, you just point to the most recent tax cut and take credit.

More fundamentally, if tax cuts increased revenue, why is per capita revenue growth near zero since 2001 after adjusting for inflation? Bowyer's cherry-picked data tell us nothing.

Jerry Bowyer's misleading media bias claim (4/25/07)

...In a column today on NRO Financial, Jerry Bowyer, a conservative columnist/radio host/investment adviser, blames media bias for the lack of coverage of current levels of black unemployment under President Bush...

...The problem is that Bowyer is comparing apples to oranges -- he's juxtaposing 8.3 percent unemployment in a single month under President Bush with the "average rate achieved during President Bill Clinton's second term." In fact, black unemployment dropped all the way to 7.3 percent during Clinton's second term, and the average of Clinton's second term was lower than the average under Bush.

Bad economics at National Review (6/21/06)

...To support these meaningless data -- what does the combined net worth of all US households and nonprofits mean? -- Bowyer offers what might be the most useless bar chart ever created:

Bowyer's chart has three primary flaws: (1) it combines Bill Gates with homeless people and everyone in between, giving us no sense of how middle class or poor families are doing; (2) it lumps together nonprofits and households; (3) it gives us no sense of how household net worth has changed over time. The first flaw is analogous to President Bush using "average" tax cut statistics that are skewed upward by high-income individuals...

What is Jerry Bowyer talking about? (7/12/05)

...He writes that "states that went for George W. Bush in the last election are considerably poorer than the ones that went for Kerry. The notion that the GOP is the party of the rich simply doesn't match the economic reality."

But you can't make reliable inferences about individual behavior from aggregate data; this is what is known as the "ecological fallacy". And the obvious counterpoint to Bowyer is that the bivariate correlations between party and income are pretty clear...

Worst online poll ever

This latimes.com online poll might be the least scientific ever:

Do you agree with Pres. Bush that 30 months in federal prison is excessive for telling a lie?

There's, um, a crucial fact missing: Libby was convicted of lying under oath. (Note to the LAT: Lying is not a federal crime.)

Washington Post wins the haircut Pulitzer

Today, the Washington Post's John Solomon devotes 1200+ words to an interview with John Edwards's hair stylist. The Founders would be so proud.

The return of incoherent Clinton hatred

Bill and Hillary Clinton's joint campaign swing through Iowa is inspiring both pathological press coverage and the incoherent hatred that made the Clinton years so special:

Mr. Clinton’s presence was mostly but not universally welcomed here. While the couple drew cheers from hundreds at the parade — homemade “Hillary 2008” signs adorned front porches and one woman thanked Mr. Clinton for “saving Africa” — a couple of men booed Mr. Clinton along the way. “Go back to Canada!” another man shouted at him — eight times. Mr. Clinton walked on.

"Go back to Canada"? Clinton isn't from Canada, so I'm guess the crazy guy thinks (incorrectly) that Clinton went to Canada to dodge the draft during Vietnam, and now wants him to go back. Or something.

(PS Is the woman who thanked Clinton for "saving Africa" any less crazy?)

Independents on independents

Writing on Talking Points Memo, Steve Benen bashes self-described independents who told the Washington Post that they wouldn't seriously consider supporting an independent presidential candidate:

There was, however, one piece of information from the report that struck me as odd.

While these independents swung substantially to the Democratic side in 2006, 77 percent of them say they would seriously consider voting for an independent if one were running.

Is it me, or is 77% a little low? Nearly one-in-four self-described independents wouldn't consider voting for an independent? Then why even consider yourself an independent?

Must be part of that no-idea-what-they're-talking-about bloc.

Many of these voters may be confused partisans who call themselves independents, but isn't it also possible that some of them recognize the futility of independent candidacies? Why should they have to waste their vote out of principle?

Alberto Gonzales: Best AG ever!

According to the Congressional testimony of Paul Charlton, the former US Attorney for Arizona, Alberto Gonzales supported the death penalty for a crime in which DOJ was too cheap to actually dig up the body and examine it for forensic evidence (but Scooter Libby's sentence was excessive!):

The facts underlying the case of United States v. Rios Rico allege that the defendant, a methamphetamine dealer, murdered his supplier. The majority of the government's case relies on the testimony of cooperating witness, witnesses who have pleaded guilty to a charge and agreed to testify against the defendant. This evidence justifies, in my opinion, bringing a case against the defendant and, in the event of a conviction, seeking a term of prison for a term of years or life.

What removes Rios Rico from the realm of a death penalty case is the lack of forensic evidence directly linking the defendant to the victim's death. That means, for example, that there is no gun, no ballistics, no victim's DNA on the defendant. In fact, there is no body.

This paucity of forensic evidence, evidence that doesn't forget and cannot lie, means, in my opinion, that Rios Rico should not be a death penalty case. If a government seeks to take another person's life it should do so on only the best of evidence. I argue, therefore, that it is right to consider not just that the government is likely to win a prosecution, here I believe that there is a great likelihood of success, I argue that it is right to consider the quality of the evidence before seeking death. Where the evidence is largely testimonial, and forensic evidence is lacking, the risk that we are wrong, that we might convict and execute the wrong man, however slight, is too high.

Just as compelling though, is this additional fact: the government knows where the body lies. The victim is buried in a landfill in Mobile, Arizona. For the price of between $500,000 to $1,000,000, the government can exhume the body. While I served as the U.S. Attorney, we asked DOJ to pay for the exhumation. DOJ refused.

The body of the victim, were it recovered, might provide the forensic evidence that would ensure sufficient evidence to allow the government to seek the death penalty in good conscience. The body might, on the other hand, provide evidence that exculpates the defendant in some manner. Either way, it is wrong for the government to both seek the death penalty and at the same time refuse to provide funds to obtain evidence that could prove a vital link in supporting or negating its position.

With this in mind, I sought to convince the Death Penalty Committee not to recommend death in this case. The line Assistant U.S. Attorney's, the prosecutors assigned to the case, made their arguments to the Death Penalty Committee in person and we submitted a written memorandum setting out the reasons in support of my view that the death penalty was not appropriate. Under the previous Attorney General, when the Death Penalty Committee disagreed with my decision, I was notified of that disagreement. Here, the Death Penalty Committee rejected my position and that of the line Assistants. I received no word of their disagreement until I received a letter from Attorney General Gonzales "authorizing" me to seek the death penalty. No one had sought my opinion or provided me with an opportunity to give additional input after our initial presentation to the Death Penalty Committee.

Once I received the Attorney General's letter, I asked to have the decision reconsidered. In so doing I spoke with a number of individuals, including people within the Office of the Attorney General and the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. My most memorable discussion took place with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. After speaking with McNulty, I received a call from his chief of staff, Mike Elston. Elston indicated that McNulty had spoken to the Attorney General and that McNulty wanted me to be aware of two things. First, that McNulty had spent a significant amount of time on this issue with the Attorney General, perhaps as much as 5 to 10 minutes. Second, McNulty wanted me to know that in presenting my view, he, McNulty, had remained neutral, neither supporting nor opposing my position. I was struck that on an issue as important as whether to execute someone, so little time would be devoted to the topic and that the Deputy Attorney General would maintain a neutral position. Elston reported that the Attorney General remained in favor of seeking the death penalty.

When I asked to speak with the Attorney General personally on this issue, he denied my request.

My favorite part is that 5-10 minutes is supposed to be "a significant amount" of the Attorney General's time. A man's life is at stake!

Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern. Gonzales prepared notoriously sloppy memos about scheduled executions for then-Governor Bush in Texas, which they reviewed in only 15 minutes. According to Gonzales, Bush reduced the time slot from 30 minutes because "over time, I became more efficient in giving him that information ... [a]nd he became more comfortable in making his decision based on the information I gave him." Right.

Annoying Bill & Hillary coverage

The decision by Bill and Hillary Clinton to campaign together has prompted a predictable onslaught of annoying press coverage. The New York Times referred to Bill as Hillary's "helpmate"; the AP broke out "Billary"; and Maureen Dowd has returned to her late-1990s schtick of making up dialogue between them. I don't know if I can handle another round of this nonsense. (It's yet another reason to oppose dynastic politics in any form.)