Through the Looking Glass

2011-03-20T10:18:00.008-04:00

My, it's been a while. So, this:

The helpful thing, if you're overwhelmed by so much news going on at once, is that Bahrain is roughly the same story as Libya—only instead of pro-democracy protesters being murdered by a terrorist-sponsoring monster of a dictator who has been on America's enemies list for ages, the pro-democracy protesters are being murdered by a government that is America's very own dear ally. And where Qaddafi brought in foreign mercenaries for support, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain brought in troops from our even more vital ally, Saudi Arabia.

Which... neglects to mention that until the recent unpleasantness, Qaddafi had also managed over the past few years to join the company of third-world despots with first-world cachet. He, too, was allowed to buy weapons with oil money. He was greeted with respect at state visits to Britain, France and Italy. (The pictures are suddenly hard to find on French government web sites.) His kid had cordial meetings with our Secretary of State. He had "come in from the cold." He had made himself respectable.

So, if Gaddafi is suddenly once again a whole lot less respectable than all the other dictatorial thugs we're happy to deal with, what changed?

I've got two answers: the one that actually matters, and the one you can read about in the New York Times.

The difference that actually matters is this: The incumbent scumbags in Bahrain (and Yemen, and Saudi Arabia itself, where there have been recent armed attacks on demonstrations) are attacking innocent civilians with police and small arms. Qaddafi had escalated to the army and heavy artillery.

Now, you may think this is a bad place to draw the line. But it clearly is where a whole lot of people drew the line. And not just westerners. Also, the Arab League, which consists largely of dictatorial thugs who have nevertheless, at this point, repeatedly condemned one of their own and called for armed action against him. And members of his own diplomatic corps and administration, who had served him for years, knowing full well that he was a dictatorial thug, but have now abandoned him. The armed attacks on demonstrators in Yemen and Bahrain are very, very ugly, but they aren't as ugly as attacks on entire neighborhoods and cities with indiscriminate fire from tanks. One of these things is genuinely not like the others.

But to say this is to acknowledge that there is a level of oppression, rising to the level of the occasional discreet, small-scale massacre, that the United States will happily tolerate in its otherwise faithful allies. And no one wants to say that. So we read instead, in today's New York Times, of a "Proxy Battle in Bahrian" pitting U.S. allies (particularly the Saudis) against everyone's favorite middle east bogeyman, Iran.

So, what kind of a battle is it? Not much of one. The Iranians have publicly grumbled about foreign troops in Bahrain, which has prompted much whining from Bahraini authorities about Iranian interference in Bahraini affairs. And that's pretty much it.

Which, by the way, is already more reporting than the Times itself did on the matter. Read far enough into the Times article, and you'll find the reporters admitting that

There has been no evidence that Iran played a part in Bahrain’s uprising, which was led by young Bahrainis from the Shiite majority.

But to read that, you need to get quite a way in --- that's on the second page of the online version of the story. All the Times is "reporting" on is breathless speculation from its sources (some named, some not) about a proxy battle that could, possibly, some people think, develop in the future. And it takes them that long to say so in plain English.

It seems I will soon need to pay something like $200 a year for unfettered access to this kind of reporting. I think I'll pass.

Two further notes:

First off, a lot of people are treating this as the prelude to something like the Gulf War. Which raises the question: which one? It's odd that the Bush II Gulf War, a mess we have yet to clean up, seems to have completely erased the memory of the Bush I Gulf War, in which a coalition that was carefully crafted ahead of time achieved limited objectives on time and on budget. In fact, Libyan rebels themselves, while calling for air support, have indicated that they very much want not to see American troops on the ground, because, as one said, "We don't want to be like Iraq". Which ought to deeply embarrass anyone who advocated Gulf War II as an opportunity to make Iraq a showpiece for America's benevolence --- but Tom Friedman is beyond embarrassment.

Mind you, it isn't yet clear which parallel applies. It was certainly an error for Obama to say "Qaddafi must go" before getting even his own military to buy into that. And they still haven't bought in --- the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was on Meet the Press this morning saying that Qaddafi clinging to power is "certainly one possible outcome". But I've seen too many folks who seem to start from the premise that all military intervention comes pre-doomed. No. Sometimes it works.

Second, when it comes to this stuff, you've obviously got to read with a skeptical eye, and that goes double for media based within the region. But the Emir of Qatar's pet journalists at Al Jazeera English cannot possibly have been making him any friends among the regional private jet set. In Bahrain, for example, they routinely describe the aims of protesters as legitimate and the protests themselves as basically nonviolent, while treating official excuses for violence with arch skepticism. Lately, they've been covering military raids on the capital's main hospital, which cannot possibly make the government there look good. All of this has, of course, got them banned from Bahrain. A ban which they're respecting to the extent of not naming their correspondents, who would otherwise be subject to arrest.

The ads on the live stream, though, are an odd bunch. For lack of inventory, one presumes, a lot of the available time for such stuff is being filled with spots for one local Qatari venture or another. I have no reason to doubt that Qatalum is indeed an environmentally friendly aluminum smelter, as aluminum smelters go, and I'll be sure to bear them in mind the next time I'm ordering ingots in bulk. But I really don't think I'm in their ideal target demographic.

2009-03-22T15:31:00.004-04:00

Went to see Shepard Fairey's new exhibit at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (through August 16th, about 10 minutes' walk from the Amtrak terminal at South Station).

Fairey's all about taking and processing images --- extracting out key elements, combining them, recombining them, putting them up as graffiti. Sometimes they're social commentary, sometimes they're advertising for his own line of posters and T-shirts, and sometimes they're both, and sometimes you just can't tell.

His best known work (before that "Obama" poster) was a graffiti campaign that started out as crude stickers of Andre the Giant, and then metastasized --- sprouting slogans ("Andre the Giant has a Posse"; "Obey Giant"; and finally just "Obey"), getting mixed up with other stuff (one wall has Andre's facial features plunked on top of everything from a Warhol-esque portrait of Marilyn Monroe to that once-iconic Che Guevara poster), and recombined with other more overtly political stuff. A wall of posters includes one with the Giant face formed out of type, which starts by describing itself as a commercial gimmick and then gets more strident, denouncing anyone foolish enough to keep reading as an obvious dupe. On the wall to the left, a colossal mural in the form of a giant mock banknote proclaims the obvious, hidden, truth about paper money: "This ransom note is worth exactly what you are willing to give in order to get it." Also, "In lesser gods we trust". "Obedience is the most valuable currency." And always, always, "Obey".

A word about those murals: there are several in the show, meant to mock up the wall-covering street art that Fairey's splashed all over the country, most often without authorization from the building's owner or anyone else. Look closer. The pasted-up newspaper that he's painted over isn't always completely covered. Some of it's startlingly old (I spotted news stories about World War I). And a lot of it speaks one way or another to the image that's painted on top, whether it's his rifle-toting revolutionaries (sometimes with flowers in the gun barrels, sometimes not), portraits, or those whacked-out dollar bills.

The exhibit's a bit controversial in town, as is the artist. Local bigwigs have let it be known how pleased they were that some cop arrested Fairey on the way to his own show's opening, on prior, long-standing arrest warrants for defacement. (Almost certainly to embarrass the Mayor, who's having union problems for all the usual reasons, and who gave Fairey permission, for once in his life, to redecorate a wall of City Hall.) And in one of our tonier galleries the other day --- one which periodically offers etchings by Rembrandt --- I heard one of the staffers say she had trouble taking anyone seriously who engaged in so much blatant self-promotion. (My response: "And Picasso didn't?") Well, I've just tried to describe what's on the walls. If you like that sort of thing, as a great man once said, then this is the sort of thing you will like.

Also at the ICA, through October: an video exhibit. I sometimes find these hit or miss, but there were a couple of hits. One of them literally acts out an encounter of six blind men with a remarkably patient elephant.

The other hit from the video show is a half hour record of what happens when you ask representatives of several Polish groups (right-wing students, left-wing students, church-going old ladies...) to paint up murals, and then have them each take turns doing whatever they like to their own mural, or anyone else's. It starts out gently enough: one of the student groups opens the doors to the church. But it fairly quickly gets nasty (with the left-wing students chopping up the right-wing group's emblem, and chucking it into a circle labeled "dustbin of history") and ends with clothes getting defaced and things set on fire. Any resemblance to recent events on Livejournal is strictly coincidental.

2009-03-22T15:30:00.000-04:00

While I'm reviewing things, a capsule book review: The Caryatids, by Bruce Sterling.

A brief excerpt:

He pulled the belt from his uniform. Then, without another word, he began to beat her with his belt: not angrily, but rhythmically and thoroughly.

Having been beaten by lovers before, Sonja knew how to react. With a howl of dismay, she fell to the earth, hugging his ankles and begging forgiveness in a gabble of sobs and shrieks.

When she clutched at his knees, his balance was poor, so he couldn't use the belt effectively. He stopped his attempts to beat her. She continued to shriek, beg and grovel. This was the core of the performance.

It was never about how hard men beat you, or how many strokes, or what they hit you with. It was always about their need to break your will and impose their own.

As to the dramatis personae in this scene: One is "Red Sonja" Mihajlovic, a war hero, organizer of dramatic, city-scale rescue projects, and one of the seven cloned sisters that are, collectively, the title characters. The other is an unkempt, uneducated 19-year-old desert tribesman, perhaps best described as an angry lump of meat, who Sonja has chosen to marry for reasons that were never explained to this reader's full satisfaction.

I am unable to determine which gender was insulted worse by this passage. If you think you know, please feel free to make your case in the comments.

2008-12-10T09:06:00.003-05:00

The Wall Street Journal laments the decrepit state of our investment banks:

Investment banking has since become a phantom realm, where everyone is busy but no one is doing anything. In this world, status is conferred by a quality meeting, not a completed transaction; a $700,000 salary is deemed generous; and an apocryphal story keeps circulating of a former J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. mortgage-securities banker now driving a forklift.

Scraping by on $700,000 a year. Poor fellows. Is that before or after the bonus?

(via link dump from a more reality-based source of financial commentary, the excellent Naked Capitalism...)

2008-10-08T17:32:00.003-04:00

Comrade Greenspan's Five Year Plan

Some of the damage from the housing bubble is obvious. People are getting kicked out of their homes, banks are going broke, and the damage to the financial system is bleeding all over the economy as otherwise sound firms, and even state governments, can't get credit.

But that's not the damage that would be obvious to someone who dropped down from Mars. The Martian would see a different kind of damage. For some unaccountable reason, at a moment where the apparently sapient species that dominates this planet is starting, in places (like Beijing), to literally choke and burn on its own fumes, that species chose to put an enormous amount of its aggregate resources not into new technology to deal with the problems, but instead, into building new suburbs of Las Vegas.

The reason we did this, someone might explain to the Martian, is that ultimately, it was investors who had control of these resources who decided how to allocate them --- and new technology is perceived as a risky investment, while housing was perceived as safe.

And yet, the safe investment is now the thing that's blowing up the banks. Why?

Well, at some point just a few years ago, housing was safe. Housing was safe mostly because there were a whole lot of safeguards put into the market to prevent dangerous deals. You couldn't get a mortgage to buy a house unless you demonstrated a serious ability to pay, and put in a large down payment, to make sure you had some skin in the game incase the deal went south. What happened in the meantime, starting around 2000, is that Wall Street eliminated all those safeguards, and hired Ph.D. physicists to come up with messy, complicated arguments that it was still as safe as it used to be. (Arguments which happened, in the event, to involve packaging up the loans into pools, structuring the payouts from the pools in all sorts of arcane ways, and arguing that it was the structure that was now making it safe --- structures so complex that almost no one really understands what they are.)

It seems they were wrong.

And the depressing thing is that it was all predictable. And, in fact, predicted. And, in fact, the result of deliberate policy. As the inimitable Daniel Davies explained in 2002, before the game had halfway started:

... as far as we can tell, the American consumer is basically only still spending because he thinks that magic [stock market] beans grown on the Internet will pay for everything. ... And given that the stock market's been performing pretty badly these days, and is beginning to appear on the cover of USA today, lots of people are beginning to worry that the day of reckoning might be at hand. Which would obviously, leave us in the shit.

This is the doctrine of the "wealth effect", and if you can dig up a few factoids and linear regressions to illustrate it and avoid using the word "shit", you can make a quite decent living as a pundit by repeating the paragraph above. On the other hand, if you had been placing bets on a US double-dip recession so far, you'd have lost them, because Alan Greenspan and his merry gang at the Fed have a solution to this problem. Basically, the solution's pretty simple and it involves screwing interest rates down to the floor until mortgage rates follow them down to Low Low Prices levels, and pointing out to the Great American Consumer that it's "Bye-Bye, Magic Stock Market Bubble Money!" but "Hello, Magic Housing Market Bubble Money!". Marvellous.

Well, he wasn't all right. He left out the structured finance part. But there's an important thing he got right here: the housing bubble was the result of deliberate policy, on the part of the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan --- Greenspan, who was also refusing to use the authority Congress had given him to regulate non-bank mortgage lenders, and was instead personally touting risky, safeguard-free new mortgage products to get new, insecure buyers into the housing market.

The result of which, among other things, is all those new suburbs of Las Vegas and the Californian "inland empire" which are incomplete, and falling to pieces even as the few residents get dispossessed. It's not just a financial problem. It's an immense waste of social resources --- money that could have gone into funding green technology, instead spent on enormously wasteful, doomed projects justified by high-flown rhetoric (let's boost home ownership to promote responsibility!) that had gotten completely unmoored from reality.

And with that in mind --- what was wrong with Communist central planning? Well, precisely that it used high-flown rhetoric to justify ill-conceived projects which might have been justified by lofty goals, but which ultimately just didn't work. And that's what the capitalist system seems to be giving us --- Greenspan, acting on his own, gave us the bubble.

Now, we could say that this was still another government program. But consider. The Fed isn't technically part of the government. It is nominally owned, instead, by the member banks. And while its management is appointed by Congress, it seems nevertheless to have been acting, in this case, pretty much as the shareholders would have wanted --- most of them were very active in the new, high-tech markets for subprime mortgages and their even shadier derivatives (in effect, the sheen on Greenspan's bubble), and all of them are suffering for it now. So, if we took government out of the Fed, and made it exactly what it appears to be nominally --- a corporation responsible to its shareholders --- it almost certainly wouldn't have done anything different. Particularly not if Greenspan was still running it.

Which ought, perhaps, to give pause to partisans of the "wisdom of the market", or "the wisdom of crowds"...

2008-10-03T10:48:00.003-04:00

Still wondering if there really is a financial crisis? By way of an answer, the government of California has just announced that they need a $7 billion short term bridge loan from the Fed directly. They've been borrowing in the fall for decades to cover operating expenses until Christmas-season sales taxes and state income tax revenue start rolling in, but right now, no one can get a large loan from the private sector, even if (as with the State of California) there is no realistic prospect of a default whatever.

Still, on the subject, some worrisome quotes. First, the New York Times on the last time we had systemic shutdowns in the banking sector:

In late 1930, however, a rolling series of bank panics began. Investments made by the banks were going bad — or, in some cases, were rumored to be going bad — and nervous customers besieged bank branches to demand their money back. Hundreds of banks eventually closed.

Once a bank in a given town shut its doors, all the knowledge accumulated by the bank officers there effectively disappeared. Other banks weren’t nearly as willing to lend money to local businesses and residents because the loan officers at those banks didn’t know which borrowers were less reliable than they looked. Credit dried up.

The past is prologue: the mortgage mess arose in large part because banks and funds from out of state or overseas were willing to back up mortgages in which no one even tried to verify if the borrowers were reliable ("NINA" loans --- No Income, No Assets). And those mortgages are hard to renegotiate now because there's no way for the borrowers to arrange to renegotiate them with whatever post office box in the Cayman Islands now nominally has the legal right to do that. The current "cure" seems to be a wave of mergers; over the short term, this centralizes the banking sector and hollows out whatever local infrastructure is left.

Another, from Brad DeLong:

My belief is that if Paulson were to stay on he would treat undercapitalized banks like a Goldman-Sachs honcho treats counterparties in trouble: strip them of everything and send them naked into the blizzard to live or die on their own--that's what he and Bernanke have done to the preferred and common shareholders of Freddie, Fannie, AIG, WaMu, Wachovia, Bear-Stearns, Lehman, and to the bondholders and counterparties of Lehman...

He's right about Goldman, where Paulson made his half-billion dollar personal fortune. (Michael Lewis's memoir of his time as a bond salesman in the '80s, Liar's Poker, is illuminating here on the general ethos.) But Paulson may have divided loyalties here. It's true that shareholders in particular firms have gotten pretty rough treatment at his hands, so far. But a large part of critics' misgivings about the plan is a lingering suspicion that when push comes to shove, he'll be less ripping off Wall Street on behalf of the taxpayers, than ripping off the taxpayers on behalf of institutional Wall Street...

Correction: I'd misremembered that Lewis had been at Goldman; it was actually Salomon brothers. Ouch.

2008-10-02T14:00:00.002-04:00

Ross Douthat tries to defend Sarah Palin:

Most of the attention has focused, justly, on Palin's flat-out incoherent answers to some of Couric's questions, and her difficulties deflecting obvious "gotcha" situations (Gibson on the Bush Doctrine, Couric asking what newspapers she reads and asking her to name non-Roe Supreme Court decisions with which she disagrees, etc.)

Those may not seem like "gotcha" questions to you, but the difficulty they pose is immense, as they require Palin to evaluate Supreme Court decisions, or published commentary, taken as a whole.

If, instead, she'd been asked about, say, the votes of individual Supreme Court justices, or some particular article in Foreign Affairs, there would have been no difficulty whatever.

Right?

2008-09-21T09:24:00.012-04:00

Treasury Laser-Shark Facility

Draft text of Dubya's bailout plan has leaked, and it's being criticized not just by economists, but also by constitutional scholars, who get a bit worked up about stuff like this:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary [of the Treasury] pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Me, not so much. Hey, what's to review?

Consider. Elsewhere in the draft bill, the Secretary of the Treasury is authorized to hire whoever he likes and establish whatever "administrative vehicles" he likes to buy, sell, repackage, or in any other way exploit any financial instrument "based on or related to" residential mortgages.

So, let's say he uses a small portion of the $700 billion-with-a-B that he gets under this bill to buy an island guarded by a fully-equipped two-brigade garrison from Blackwater, to build a genetic engineering lab staffed by mad scientists breeding sharks that will hatch from the egg with lasers in their heads. So long as someone in the boiler room is selling structured financial instruments that bundle shark piracy futures with residential mortgages from Cleveland, establishing the Treasury Laser-Shark Facility would be a legitimate exercise of the power granted by the draft bill, and even if oversight were allowed, there would be nothing going on to which anyone could properly object. It's all good.

But of course, we should not expect anything so exotic. Merely a slush fund which Hank Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs CEO, can use to ease the pain of his erstwhile colleagues:

"It's going to be very hard psychologically for these people," Frank said. "I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet recently. And he said of all the trials in his life, giving that up was the hardest thing he's ever done."

Sneer all you like, dear reader, but you cannot truly understand this pain, having never had a private jet. And so it is that Paulson is describing any restriction on payouts to his buddies, even a restriction on "golden parachute" payouts to high executives of failed institutions, as a "poison pill" which the Bush administration won't agree to.

Yes, that's right. They're saying that the economy will tank if we don't pass this bill immediately. And they're saying that they'll veto the bill and tank the economy to protect Wall Street insiders' golden parachutes.

Class warfare doesn't get more naked than this.

More: On a quick read of the bill, it looks as if the TLSF could only stay in business for two years, since that's how long the Secretary's authority lasts. I'm not so sure. The draft text could conceivably allow him to create agencies and sign contracts that would endure long past his own initial grant of authority. In fact, it would almost have to allow that if part of the program includes creating new "structured finance" vehicles to repackage the mortgages, which would necessarily involve creating new agencies that would administer them, enduring at least as long as any of the underlying mortgages. This was a favored trick of Robert Moses, the czar of highway-building and much other construction in New York State for literally decades. He spent much of that time as the head of public authorities whose enabling legislation said they would expire at a date certain, unless necessary to fulfil their contracts. But he'd made sure that he could create new contracts whenever he wanted by issuing a new round of bonds, thereby prolonging their existence at will.

2008-09-18T09:15:00.002-04:00

Out of a morbid attraction to train wrecks, I'm watching CNBC. One of the guests this morning was a "private equity guy" from tony Newton, Mass., who was arguing against government intervention because the market needed to work things out on its own. I didn't record his exact words, but they were something like this:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate .… It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

It's a policy line with a long and interesting history --- this was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's advice to Herbert Hoover...

2008-09-17T08:13:00.002-04:00

An interesting Google search: palin dominionist. Another: mccain imprecatory prayer.

For those who can't stand surprises: the hard-core Christianist loons regard Palin as one of their own, perhaps rightly (this would be their "stealth candidate" school-board strategy writ large). And the looniest of the lot are praying for McCain to win the election and immediately die, so that their woman can take over. What a lovely Christian sentiment...

2008-09-17T08:09:00.003-04:00

If millions of people take mortgages that they can't afford, and the ensuing mess threatens the stability of the financial system, the government can't bail them out --- some of them may have been ill-advised or rushed into bad deals by shady financiers, but it would destroy market incentives, and they just have to suffer.

If major financial institutions buy those mortgages, and the ensuing mess threatens the stability of the financial system, the government must bail them out --- they're getting off easier than they deserve, but the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Good to know.

2008-09-07T09:47:00.003-04:00

Quite a few bloggers are really excited to see Joe Biden lay into McCain on the issues. I'm not.

Biden says the Republicans don't want to talk about the issues. He's right. Instead, as Krugman notes, they're trying to make the Democrats the faces of a duplicitous, faceless "elite" that's oppressing the middle class. If this strategy works, it works by putting people in a mental bubble where anything that any Democrat says about the issues just won't penetrate, because it all comes through the emotional filter as "talking down", or "elite lies."

To counter this strategy, you've got to pop the bubble. Issue-talk itself, no matter how loud and proud, won't do that. You've got to point out who's really representing the elite in this campaign.

I'd happily trade all of this stuff and plenty more for one good, cutting remark about Cindy McCain prancing onstage at the Republican convention wearing earrings worth more than the median American house.

It's possible that the Obama campaign is reluctant to do this sort of thing because "families are off-limits", even though she was on stage at the frigging Republican convention. And maybe that's also the reason that McCain has just about completely escaped any scrutiny for failing to produce Cindy's tax returns --- even though anyone who lives in the real world knows perfectly well that her finances are also his. And if so --- would they have considered it "off-limits" to mention that Phil Gramm's wife was on Enron's board of directors, while Phil was doing their bidding in the Senate? You've got a campaign to win, guys, and politics ain't beanbag. Get over it.

2008-09-03T23:26:00.004-04:00

It was in the news this morning that McCain campaign staff was writing Sarah Palin's speech. How, then, to evaluate Palin herself?

I'm taking a few minutes away from the serious newscasts on Comedy Central to watch Wolf Blitzer literally praise her for her skill in reading a teleprompter:

And if there was any doubt that she could deliver a speech like that, Campbell, she dispelled that because she certainly -- it's not easy reading that teleprompter and knowing how to pause and that delivery. It was a well written speech. And she not only hit a home run, it might have been even a grand slam.

She didn't write the "well-written speech", but she's good at reading it off a teleprompter. Mind you, you might have to go phonetic with some of the tougher words, like "nuclear", but if you do that, you'll get a very effective delivery. A delivery for which Blitzer's mixed panel of network staff, Republican operatives, and former Republican operatives now on network staff also lathered her with legitimate, high praise.

So if this veep thing doesn't work out, I'm sure she can make a ton of money in commercial voice-over work, where quick, accurate, effective reading off a teleprompter is pretty much the whole of the job.

And if she does make it, and folks like me object to what the new administration is doing with social programs, I'm sure at some point someone's going to dust off Pat Moynihan's old line about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

2008-09-02T09:16:00.004-04:00

There's been some talk lately of unfair attacks on Sarah Palin from the liberal blogsphere, and I'm afraid to say I'd been considering joining that crowd. I was working on some kind of line about how McCain had taken the Chinese gymnastic approach to the Vice Presidential pick --- but that's unfair. He Kexin may not have met the formal age requirements, but she clearly has what it takes to do the job.

Otherwise, I'm watching an Alaskan separatist as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, flopping around like a trout in the bottom of the boat on one of her own fishing trips. But the news coverage feels like it's scripted by the Brotherhood of Dada. I mean, really.

I used to be offended by horse-race coverage of the race because it ignored substantive issues. Now, I'm offended because even taken on its own terms, it makes no sense at all. It was touted as an advantage of the pick that McCain's campaign had "won the news cycle" on the day it was announced. There are layers of nonsense here. The most obvious being that the domination has nothing to do with the particular choice at all --- any pick would have given the talking heads something to chatter about. But go deeper. They did indeed dominate the news cycle. One news cycle. They had absolute command of that evening's newscasts. On the Friday before Labor Day Weekend. When exactly did that become a prize worth winning?

At any rate, this choice is something the Obama team knows how to handle: tempting as it might be to run against her slim resume and, well... family matters, you don't. It just invites Republican attacks on Obama's resume, deserved or not. (Which ain't speculation; only political junkies and fools may have been watching CNN's Friday evening political gossip shows, but I was one of them. I need to get a life.) She's got a record, thin as it may be: take it seriously, and run against it. Of course, it helps that she introduced herself to the country by lying about it. Running for governor in 2006, she was in favor of the infamous "bridge to nowhere." It's part of her mandate, whatever she tries to say about it now.

But it's worth considering that if McCain does somehow make it to the White House, and Palin turns out to be his worst decision, that'll have to count as good luck:

2008-08-11T00:46:00.025-04:00

Reading the New York Times coverage of the war in the Caucasus between Russia and Georgia, you can learn all sorts of interesting things. One review piece, for instance, features an unnamed "American diplomat" saying, of Russia's mass grants of citizenship to residents of the disputed regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia:

The West had been skeptical of the validity of Russia’s handing out passports by the thousands to citizens of another nation.

“Having a document does not make you a Russian citizen,” one American diplomat said in 2004, as Russia expanded the program.

If the document is a proof of citizenship issued by the Russian government, most people would say that's the end of it. But this "American diplomat" says that the Russians can only naturalize people if we approve. Who knew?

But there's one thing that you probably won't learn from the Times: who started the shooting. The facts don't seem to be much in dispute. On August 8, the Georgians announced that most of South Ossetia had been "liberated" in an overnight offensive. ("Liberated", that is, from an internationally unrecognized separatist government that had been running the territory for years, as in Iraqi Kurdistan during the '90s, or more recently in Kosovo. [Late edit:] it's also worth noting, from amid the fog of war, multiple reports from the respectable British press of refugees claiming that the "liberation" had more or less leveled the largest town in the area.) This wasn't the first armed action in the region --- Georgian shells had killed Ossetian civilians as early as July 4 --- but it was the first territorial incursion. The present Russian action, disproportionate and brutal as it is (including attacks on Georgian cities outside the disputed regions), is nevertheless a response. And if the point of it is to seek regime change in a state (Georgia) that's pursuing reckless armed action on Russia's borders, well... our recent actions in Iraq, and Israel's in Lebanon, have given them precedent for that, too.

So, what does our American paper of record have to say about this? I'll admit to not reading every word, but I've looked at a couple of review pieces, meant to give readers an overview and perspective on the conflict. This one, by Helene Cooper, says

[T]he decision by the United States and Europe to recognize Kosovo may well have paved the way for Russia’s lightning-fast decision to send troops to back the separatists in South Ossetia.

without mentioning any more recent events that might, just possibly, have had an influence.

The same piece notes that "Georgia was pulling its troops out of the capitol of the breakaway region" without mentioning that they'd been there for only a day, or that their incursion was what triggered the Russians' "lightning-fast" response.

The other one is even more comical, and not just for the musing on the nature of citizenship that started this post. This analysis, to its credit, lists quite a few U.S. actions that have tempted Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (first elected to Parliament there in 1995 after starting the year as a lawyer in New York) to try to "get tough" with the Russians. But the litany goes in chronological order, and what's at the end?

One American official who covers Georgian affairs, speaking on the condition of anonymity while the United States formulates its next public response, said that everything had gone wrong.

Mr. Saakashvili had acted rashly, he said, and had given Russia the grounds to invade. The invasion, he said, was chilling, disproportionate and brutal, and it was grounds for a strong censure. But the immediate question was how far Russia would go in putting Georgia back into what it sees as Georgia’s place.

Conspicuously missing: A clear statement of what Saakashvili's "rash action" actually was --- that he'd sent his army into a region with a de facto independent government, where most of the residents had Russian passports and wanted nothing to do with his government.

That's how far the American "paper of record" will bend over backwards to avoid saying that our would-be ally fired the first shots in the war that he's now losing. It's not a new low for the paper. It's not even as low as when it, for example, became an uncritical broadsheet broadcaster of duplicitous Pentagon pro-war propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war. But it reminds you once again what modern American "objective" journalism is --- they're objectively repeating what Acceptable Sources (as determined by quotability at Georgetown cocktail parties) want you to believe, while leaving anyone else's view (including their own) completely out of it.

None of this, of course, is meant as a defense of the Russian counter-invasion, which has (once again) included strikes on cities well outside the disputed regions, with civilian casualties. This appears to be one of those miserable conflicts where no one is acting like the good guys --- which is to say, it's like almost all of them. But if you're getting your news from even "respectable" American media, you'd think otherwise. The difference in tone between American coverage of this story and, say, the BBC is remarkable.

2008-07-29T10:21:00.002-04:00

A few days ago, Matthew Yglesias was lamenting all the reporters spending time trying to track down a copy of Barack Obama's undergraduate thesis:

When I was in college, I wrote a senior thesis. It was even, in a sense, on a politically relevant topic having to do with John Rawls' Political Liberalism. ... But realistically, insofar as I can recall what the thesis said ... it says stuff I don't believe anymore. If you really want to gain additional insights into what Matt Yglesias thinks about the issues, you should probably read my frequently updated blog.

Well, maybe so. But knowing where people came from can, at least, provide insights into their character. A few years ago, Stephen Schwartz did a piece at National Review responding to accusations that a lot of prominent neocons were flaming, open Trotskyists in their political youth. As with Yglesias, Schwartz didn't so much deny it (facts are facts, and they are on the record), as dismiss their relevance.

Now, maybe an endorsement of Matt's position is why we don't see more references to "ex-Trotskyist Irving Kristol" in journals of refined opinion. But I, for one, think there are insights into their character here, and think that we could stand to have at least a little more discussion of these guys' political upbringing in groups and movements dedicated to the use of deception and false fronts in undermining the health of capitalist states from within.

2008-07-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

The luxury New York real estate market isn't in the same doldrums as, say, Irvine, California, or at least not yet. But the New York Times is still taking time out to profile the little people who have been hurt by the general real estate collapse. People like John Devaney:

One by one, John Devaney sold his treasures, hoping to forestall what was in the end inevitable. He sold his Renoir and his Gulfstream, his home and his helicopter. Even his cherished yacht — gone.

The poor guy was doing all trying to save his hedge fund, which numerous advisors had told him liquidate at a loss while he still could. Instead, he and his investors were all wiped out. But Devaney hasn't lost perspective. He still knows what it's all about. Just listen to the man himself:

I feel horrible that I’ve lost my own money and that so many people who saw the skills I have and trusted in us have now been hurt.

Even in his loss, he realizes still that in the final analysis, it's all about him.

And, turning to comments on the story on Yves Smith's blog, Naked Capitalism, we find more on what those skills really were (with a little added emphasis from yours truly):

I have a limited partner ... that unfortunately had over 60% of his net worth tied up in Devaney's funds. He told me late last year that Devaney was telling his investors ... he could return between 20% and 60% of their capital ... if he "just had a little more time" and could effect "an orderly liquidation" of the positions. I told my LP at the time: "This guy is a fraud, a liar and he's going to lose 100% of your money by the time this is all finished." ... What a clown. Although I have little sympathy for my LP who was seduced by the siren call of 40% annual returns in "safe mortgage investments."

As subsequent commenters noted, the underlying mortgages were paying nowhere near 40%. This had to be snake oil. But plenty of wealthy people, by any reasonable standard (you need millions in net worth to be allowed anywhere near a hedge fund) went for it.

But can't we have sympathy for the poor multi-millionaires who just want to add a little more cash to the already awesome pile? See how put-upon they are. Salt of the earth types, like Lady Lynn de Rothschild, now alienated from the Democratic Party because its presidential candidate seems elitist. Meaning that he thinks he knows better than she does what's best for the country.

Mind you, it's not like the rich themselves have all that much sympathy for the poor saps who took out those bad loans. But hey, it's America. Responsibility is for little people.

2008-07-11T09:46:00.002-04:00

It's been weeks since Hillary Clinton left the Presidential race. She has now repeatedly, and enthusiastically, endorsed Barack Obama. And yet, there are still sites out there, like this one, whose pseudonymous hosts are "supporting" her almost entirely by attacking the candidate who she has endorsed. What are we to make of this?

Well, there are all sorts of reasons for posting pseudonymously, and one shouldn't necessarily impute any particular motive. But people sometimes do it to conceal their true motives. Alexander Hamilton, for instance, published his essays in support of the proposed U.S. Constitution as "Publius" largely because he'd already made it plain to enough folks that in reality, he was opposed to it. (He wanted a strong executive.)

Which leaves me, as one pseud, asking of another: when "pro-Hillary" blogs echo Republican talking points and act as collection points for attack ads against Democratic nominees, what's really going on? An old Roman had a way of answering that question --- by posing another: cui bono? Who does it help?

2008-06-22T10:49:00.006-04:00

An excerpt from a speech Obama almost certainly won't deliver in support of the promised filibuster of telecom immunity that apparently won't happen either:

I address myself now to my colleagues from the other side of the aisle --- to Republicans now facing at least the possible prospect of a Democratic president. A Democratic president who would have the new power created in this bill --- the power to authorize American telecommunications companies to snoop on anyone, anywhere, anytime, and to halt any subsequent investigation of the matter in its tracks simply by showing a secret court in a classified proceeding that he had authorized the measure. Not that it was justified by national security or balance of harms or any other criteria --- contrary to what you may have heard from the leadership of the Other Body, or read in Newsweek, a plain reading of the text of the bill says that if the Attorney General says it was authorized, nothing else matters.

And I thank my Republican colleagues, because, well... not to put to fine a point on it, but I think we all know who that possible future Democratic president is likely to be. And I remember, as I'm sure you do too, how little many of you trusted the last one. How that last president was described as a liar, untrustworthy, bloodthirsty --- how major news sources wondered out loud about whether the unfortunate suicide of one of his aides was murder --- and how he was ultimately impeached for perjuriously answering a question which... well, I've reread it twice coming in here, and I don't even understand it! But you Republicans who support this bill apparently feel that nothing remotely like this would ever come up with a future Democratic president.

And I appreciate that. And I will remember it. I may mention on the campaign trail, if my judgment is questioned, that you, those of you who would vote in favor of giving a future Democratic president this power, knowing who it would likely be, had no qualms whatever in doing so. I will certainly remember it in the future, should that Democratic administration propose some other security measure to which you do object --- and at that time, if not before, I would certainly remind the people.

Because this isn't a vote about now. It's not a vote about the past. This is a vote about the future. About what kind of country we are. About what kind of country we want to be. It's not about this side versus that side, not your team versus my team or your party against my party. It's about whether, even after the wiretapping of Martin Luther King and of members of this body for political purposes, exposed by the Church committee within living memory of many of those standing before me, any executive of any party ought to ever be trusted with unchecked, unreviewable, unaccountable, raw power to secretly snoop on everybody in the country, including you yourselves, with no checks and balances whatever.

I say no. A bill to grant that power ought to never leave this chamber.

Oh, well. I've been wrong about him before...

2008-06-05T13:59:00.004-04:00

Many moons ago, I attended a panel discussion at Harvard's Kennedy School about the state of the War on Terror. At one point, the panel was asked whether the administration had made us safer now. Three members of the panel cautiously restated Washington conventional wisdom that there had been no subsequent attack on the scale of 9/11, so someone must be doing something right, even if no one could quite articulate who, what, where, when, or how. The fourth was Samantha Power, who stated forthrightly that the war had inflamed Arab sentiment, and made us less safe. Asked, in a follow-up, what we might do about it, she responded with the closest thing I've ever heard in person to the Dean Scream: "Obama for President! Whoooo!"

It's not often I get to accuse the author of a highly regarded book on genocide in the modern world of being naive, but come on. His record already made him out to be a good, promising guy, as far as it went --- but with no national recognition, the race factor, and numerous other, better known candidates in the race, he didn't have a chance.

2008-06-02T04:01:00.002-04:00

A man has been chosen to convince the world that Microsoft, producers of Windows Vista and the Zune, are sleek, hot, and hip. Could there be a better name for this man than Bogusky?

But if Alex Bogusky wants to understand the true nature of the problem he faces, he need only look in a mirror, as FastCompany reports:

It's a month after Bogusky's team landed the Microsoft account in March, and the Boulder office is splattered with Gatesian fingerprints, including quotes tacked to the stainless-steel fridges in the kitchen that read like awkward, off-key motivational nuggets: There are over 1 billion Windows Live ID authentifications per day, says one. Bogusky works on a raised platform in Crispin's 70,000-square-foot space, which once housed an indoor soccer field. His desk seems almost to levitate above the vast openness. A shiny new silver MacBook Air sits in front of him, next to his aviator sunglasses.

Sheesh. He's so attached to the MacBook that he can't even hide it from a reporter?

2008-06-02T03:56:00.001-04:00

As the undead corpse of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign keeps stubbornly shambling towards Denver, her remaining supporters --- the ones who still think she can be in it to win it --- are easy to understand. We've seen blind fanatics before. Her would-be enablers are harder to figure out. These are the folks who acknowledge that she has no realistic chance at securing the nomination, but urge nevertheless that the campaign be treated with a respect which it hasn't deserved for over a month. But what might that mean, in the light of the campaign's own behavior?

Let's review.

The controversy of the moment has been the disposition of convention delegates from Florida and Michigan, two states which tried to move primaries before dates set by a party committee, and were told they'd suffer the drastic penalty of seating no delegates at all. The upshot in Michigan was particularly farcical, with all major candidates except Clinton acceding to a DNC request that they take their names off the ballot, leaving a primary "election" where the voters were offered one candidate only, and told that their votes won't count --- by, among many other people, Hillary Clinton herself. However, now, when Hillary needs delegates to keep up the pretense that she still has a shot at the nomination, one of her campaign panjandrums, Harold Ickes, spent hours in a rules committee meeting last weekend arguing the fundamental injustice of this procedure, and its unfairness to the voters. So, who were the miscreants and blackguards who did wrong by the voters by voting for the 100% penalty in the first place? Well, one of them was the same Harold Ickes.

Now, I can understand concerns about the fairness of all these proceedings. For one thing, any fair proceeding considering the case on the merits would have laughed Ickes out of the room for the flip-flop alone (his own absurd rationalizations notwithstanding). But there is a larger point here. The Democratic nomination process is deliberately not designed to faithfully represent the will of the voters (whoever they are, which varies enough state to state to make that a dicey concept already). One of the reasons for holding caucuses, for instance, is to reward candidates who demonstrate an ability to organize effectively. Obama's done that --- and now Clinton has been out and about saying that caucus states "don't count", and floating "popular vote counts" that exclude them. Come on. Everyone knew the rules going in. (With the apparent exception of Clinton's campaign strategist, Mark Penn --- but it's her fault for hiring the guy.)

But then again, Clinton's camp has been saying a lot of strange things lately. She said, as I've already mentioned, that the Michigan vote "won't count for anything", then went back on that when it turned out she needed the delegates. And when the rules committee this weekend went with a plan that came from Michigan's state Democratic Party, Ickes went batshit, claiming to know better than them what was right for the state. (He also professed to be astounded that anyone would make a big deal out of the four delegate difference between Michigan's proposal and the one he was pushing --- but he was the one threatening a convention floor fight. That's life in HillaryLand. Or undeath. Whatever.)

By the way, Clinton has also said that she would actively support and campaign for the eventual nominee, even if it turned out to be somebody else. Just like she said she was happy stripping delegates from Michigan.

The greater concern here is that the general vituperation and hostile atmosphere here could split the party and let the Republicans back into the race. For an example, consider this Hillary supporter, ejected from the Rules Committee meeting this weekend, who told reporters that Obama was an "inadequate black male", before complaining that she was being treated as a "second class citizen". (She's from New York, where primary votes count in full.) We're beyond dog whistles here; the racism is out in the open. And while some of this stuff was, perhaps, inevitable, and beyond Clinton's control, this wasn't --- she was part of a crowd that the Clinton organization bussed in for the hearing, other members of which were heard chanting "McCain! McCain! McCain!" in the hearing itself.

Hillary Clinton is choosing to give this stuff a platform. And succoring it by telling her supporters, over and over, that procedures that her representatives agreed to nearly a year ago leave her somehow being cheated.

So, if you think Obama should try to compromise, what more exactly should he do? (The rules committee, for instance, was dominated by his supporters, and didn't have to give an inch. And they do have the state committees to consider --- even if Clinton apparently doesn't). And if you think this isn't unreasonable behavior on the part of the Clinton campaign, what would be?

2008-05-26T09:34:00.007-04:00

This is Ty Ziegel's wedding portrait: It was taken after his return from Iraq, and extensive reconstructive surgery, by a photographer on assignment with People magazine, who had several days to get to know the couple, and had their cooperation.

The photo won the World Press Photo competition for portraiture in 2007, and the couple has cooperated with the media since, as part of the Ziegel family's attempts to improve services for other wounded veterans. (Ty's brother deployed to Iraq after Ty came home.) However, some found the image disturbing, and assumed it must have been published against their will. Because they didn't see how showing a wounded soldier would support the troops.

2008-05-23T16:48:00.004-04:00

And now... missed opportunities

Jason Taylor made it to the finals of Dancing With the Stars, but that apparently doesn't sit too well with the new management athis day job, as a defensive end for the Miami Dolphins (to wit, football genius and famed all-around grouch Bill Parcells). The nominal complaint is that he missed a few "optional" minicamps, which he almost certainly didn't need --- he's not a rookie, knows the game, and is staying in shape. But all around, there are rumors that the real problem is that dancing just doesn't show the kind of macho that's expected of football players.

Well, except for touchdown celebrations. And lately, celebrations of a sack. Which means Parcells is missing an opportunity. If Taylor added some professional choreography after his sacks, which were just about the only good thing Miami fans had to look last year, it might distract their attention from all the other stuff happening on the field. Which, given the state of the team (which lost its first 13 games last season), could only be good news for team management.

2008-05-22T00:45:00.002-04:00

The latest from the Hillary Stassen campaign:

Desperate to get attention for her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”

“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe," Clinton explained. "Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.

Well, not quite. What actually happened in Zimbabwe was that everybody agreed on the rules for the election, and then one side started playing funny games with which votes would count, and how, when the results proved not to their liking...

2008-05-20T09:15:00.000-04:00

It's nice to see Yankee fans showing their respect for baseball tradition:

Ok nobody mention that Lester's got a no hitter thus far. We're above that type of stuff at NYYFans.

I would be deeply disturbed if anyone made mention of his no hitter through five innings on this website. As baseball fans, we understand how rare a no hitter is and wouldn't want to ruin Jon Lester's chances at a no hitter.

This guy was not the only one eager to remind his fellow Yankee fans that it's considered a jinx to mention a no-hitter in progress.

On behalf of Red Sox Nation, I'd like to say we appreciate the sentiment. As, I'm sure, does Jon Lester, last seen icing his arm after completing his no-hitter.

2008-05-20T09:13:00.003-04:00

I think most of my readers are probably aware of Obama's "crazy preacher" problem. But you may not appreciate just how bad it is. To make the point, here's a clip of a preacher, one John Hagee, repeatedly saying that Hitler was sent by god to chase the Jews back to Israel: This isn't Obama's preacher. In fact, it's a guy whose endorsement was sought out by McCain. But that just shows how bad Obama's problem is --- because it's worse than this guy. It must be. After all, Obama's guy is the one the mainstream media keeps talking about.

via Seeing the Forest and The Sideshow.

2008-05-16T09:15:00.006-04:00

A case study in differential diagnosis of protestors' motives:

Let's say that you don't much like Chinese censorship of the Internet, or American cooperation with the same. Where might you protest, and why?

Ultimately, this is a matter of Chinese law, which can't be changed by anyone other than the Chinese government. So, you might protest there --- but the Chinese government isn't exactly known for its concern for the views of foreign protestors. So, are there other possibilities for a protest that might actually have some use?

As it happens, there are American companies who are bending over backwards to help the Chinese secret police. And it might make a difference to protest them. You might start with, say, Cisco, a company which aggressively markets and shamelessly supplies the technology that the Chinese have used to build the great firewall. Or, say, Yahoo!, which has cooperated with Chinese prosecution of reporters for revealing "state secrets" (which, in China, means any information that any bureaucrat finds inconvenient), and then lied about it.

These are what you'd do if the aim of your protest was to improve the world. On the other hand, if the aim of your protest was to prove your own virtue, and to heck with the rest of the world, there might be a more attractive target. Say, Google --- a company which, by contrast with these other two, does the bare minimum required to comply with Chinese law, limits its activities in China to minimize even that, and publicly wrings its hands over that level of cooperation, even though the only alternative would be to stay out of China altogether. And which, by the way, doesn't make a difference in China --- because of all this, their market share there is in the dumps.

If you protest against Yahoo! or Cisco --- well, it's not much to be better than those guys. But if you protest against Google, you prove to the world that you're better than the Googlers! They're proving their virtue by limiting their activities, but you're proving your superior virtue because it's not good enough!

So, guess where the Billboard Liberation Front was doing street theater the other day, with physical representations of the "Great Firewall of China". At Cisco, which supplied the bricks and mortar? Nope. At Google, which is trying to limit the degree to which they're compromised by it.

So, here's where we are. If your company enthusiastically buddies up to the corrupt authorities in an unavoidable, large, and growing market, these clowns will quietly leave you alone. On the other hand, if you limit your cooperation, and publicly agonize about it, they will go out of their way to embarrass you at your shareholders' meeting.

To encourage socially responsible behavior. Or to demonstrate, by comparison, the superior size of their ethical dicks. Whichever.

The sad thing is, I don't even like Google. Among the many things they do that piss me off: pervasively click-tracking any American internet user who doesn't adopt stringent technical measures to avoid it, and getting buddy-buddy with the American intelligence agencies --- marketing technology which no doubt gets used for surveillance here, and who knows what else. But the first issue is harder to explain, and the second has moral ambiguities that someone with more of a public profile might notice. So, neither issue is really suitable for a quick ethical dick-length demo. And so, China.

2008-05-15T09:31:00.004-04:00

The Republican Party seems to be in a bit of trouble. They've just lost a few by-elections for House seats that have been safe for decades. Clearly, they need to do something to reconnect with the voters. To reestablish that they share their concerns. And Republican Senator Arlen Specter has just the thing:

A day after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell met with former Patriots video employee Matt Walsh and said he did not expect any further sanctions against the team or coach Bill Belichick over Spygate, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) called for an independent investigation into the Patriots' taping of opposing coaches' signals which violated league rules.

There may indeed be further questions that need asking, here. Why, for instance, were known instances of unauthorized taping by other teams subjected to nothing like the same penalty? But I'm not entirely sure that those are the questions Specter means to raise.

Then again, it's got to be better for the Republicans than talking about the economy. Or the war...

2008-05-13T23:32:00.003-04:00

It looks like the long, drawn-out Democratic primary process may finally be drawing to a close, now that Obama has nearly secured the critical IOZ endorsement:

Barack Obama may in fact be precisely the hollow messiah that he appears, ... a sort of national Deepak Chopra, peddling easy salvation without actually doing anything. That, needless to say, is a program I can get behind. Four years of new-age-Christian babble is the least harmful outcome that I can imagine at the current moment in the empire. Let us all go upward and forward toward the future of our destiny leading the world forever. I am in favor of directions, whichever ones they are.

This will no doubt disappoint supporters of Hillary Clinton, who want the voters to have a meaningful choice in every single primary on the schedule, right to the last, now that her initial plan to end it all by Super Tuesday has failed to pan out.

For more on Clinton, see the Fafblog interview...

2008-05-13T11:30:00.020-04:00

In case you think I was too hard on One Laptop Per Child head Nicholas Negroponte in my last blog post, here's one of the milder bits from a scathing polemic by former project security guru Ivan Krstić:

I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yeah, I'm not sure what that leaves either.

It seems Negroponte's much touted rhetoric about "an education project, not a laptop project" was all for show. As I said in the last post, it's all about shipping as many computers as possible, never mind what happens next.

And yes, that quote is mild; Krstić goes on to warn of a looming "historical fuckup unparalleled in scale," unless the project starts to seriously work on deployment. There really wasn't much more to the plan than to ship thousands of laptops in crates, and let the kids figure it out; for complaining about this, Krstić got a ticket to South America to try to make it work. Which it did, in some places, to an extent that I find surprising, but that's a report from a pilot site that received Krstić's personal help during startup; part of the problem is the lack of effective surveys to see whether that best-case report is typical. Besides, if the kids really were all figuring it out for themselves, the remaining OLPC staffers wouldn't be pleading for outside assistance. (Though, regardless, "historical fuckup unparalleled in scale" is a little much even for me. With computers, you can err a great deal, but to really fuck up, you need deadly weapons.)

The whole jeremiad is worth a read, including some interesting and useful reality checks on utopian rhetoric in the open source community...

(via OLPC news; note also this entry subjected to a lot more late editing than usual...)

2008-05-12T09:44:00.006-04:00

A success story of technology helping third-world farmers:

Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.
Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC's village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers. ...
The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.

Gee. You know what could be really helpful in trying to spread this sort of thing? An extremely rugged, very low-power laptop (for long battery life) with sophisticated built-in wireless networking, designed for easy field repairs, with audio-visual features built in to help guide semi-literates through the UI. Kinda like the machine being built by One Laptop Per Child.

But alas, Mr. Singh is not a child, and so he is not in OLPC's target user base. Which remains, as before, children only. Though the project's direction is changing in other respects, as project founder and leader Nicholas Negroponte explains:

"I think that means and ends, as often happens, got confused," he says. "The mission is learning and children. The means of achieving that were, amongst others, open source and constructionism. In the process of doing that, open source in particular became an end in itself, and we made decisions along the way to remain very pure in open source that were not in the long-term interest of the project."

So, open source is no longer part of the mission, to the general distress of techies associated with the project. And constructivism was never much of a guiding star to begin with --- stripped to its essence, it amounts to asserting that if you give kids computers and leave them alone, they'll figure out what to do with them entirely on their own. (Indeed, some of them will, and they are the sort of people who tend to wind up at MIT --- which explains the appeal of that philosophy there. But the rest of them need lesson plans.)

In short, the goal of the project seems to devolve into getting computer hardware --- specifically their own hardware (recall OLPC's contentious and combative approach to anyone else in their space, like Intel's Classmate) --- into childrens' hands by any means necessary. As acknowledged by new project CEO Charles Kane:

"The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible," he said. "Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one consulting company or another doesn't matter."

"It's about getting it into kids' hands," he continued. "Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for."

Which brings me to the question I was asking more than a year ago --- why just kids? Why just huge, bloc government deployments? Why not give them to anyone in the third world with a use for them? Why not just sell the damn things, and let the people in the third world themselves figure out what they're good for?

And to answer that, you've got to go back to what this project is really about. "Helping the children" will get Nicholas invited to the cool parties at Davos. "Selling computers" will not.

More: Here's one suggestion: a deployment plan modeled on what Grameen is already doing with cell phones: extending loans to local cooperatives which buy the gizmo and rent access. A similar model has been used in Nicaragua to fund deployment of local solar power systems in areas where there is no power grid; those are a heck of a lot more expensive than an OLPC unit.

2008-05-09T09:26:00.003-04:00

Japan is experiencing one of the perils of adopting a Westernized, resource-heavy lifestyle: a population explosion of trash-picking varmints. Specifically, in their case, crows, whose nests on power lines have become a cause of repeated power failures, including one that recently shut down the bullet trains. And the Times reports that

The crow explosion has created a moral quandary for Japan, a nation that prides itself on nonviolence and harmony with nature, because culling programs are the only truly effective method of population control.

Well, the pride in nonviolence may be a new development, since World War II. (Or were all those samurai swords meant as conversation pieces?) But back then, the Japanese homeland was never invaded, and now, the crows are on their turf. So, city governments are setting out baited traps, and power companies are sending out uniformed crow patrols. And the crows are fighting back:

In Kagoshima, they are even trying to outsmart the Crow Patrol. The birds have begun building dummy nests as decoys to draw patrol members away from their real nests.

Well, after all those years of humans putting up scarecrows, turnabout is fair play.

It could be worse. The crows are displaying intelligence somewhat superior to the average Nigerian 419 scammer, but they haven't figured out what the infrastructure they keep wrecking is actually good for. Yet. When they start pirating internet service... watch out.

2008-05-07T23:31:00.000-04:00

There's no reason for Hillary Clinton to stop running for president. Harold Stassen never had to stop running either.

2008-05-07T23:30:00.005-04:00

Brad DeLong, a professor at Berkeley, sent a letter to the faculty senate chair asking him, in modest, reasoned terms, to have someone look into whether it's the best idea for John "Torture Memo" Yoo to be employed at the school as a teacher and role model for new young lawyers.

The same blog post has Academic Senate chair William Drummond's response:

Creating the panel you recommend to examine Prof. Yoo’s conduct would be defamatory on the face of it. Besides that, there’s the practical problem of finding committee members with the expertise you outline.

On the second point, Drummond clearly doth protest too much: another pseudonymous Charles has fun listing numerous qualified committee members from Berkeley's own faculty.

But consider the first: can merely raising questions be defamatory? Well, the questions are being raised, regardless. If Drummond really thinks they're unjust, and that his faculty member is being maligned by them, I can think of worse ways to deal with the situation than convening a few of his colleagues to investigate the matter, say how they're unjust, and provide a half-decent defense.

But Drummond doesn't want to do that. It's almost as if he knows damn well what would come out of that kind of inquiry, and he just doesn't want to hear it.

2008-05-06T09:05:00.003-04:00

Meanwhile, in Brazil, Linux is becoming very popular. Why? Well, one reason is that the Windows license on a home PC costs something like 10% of per capita income. That's not for the computer, just the software license. Several major Linux distributions are free. And that would make even more of a difference in the even poorer countries which are being targeted by the One Laptop Per Child project.

Which explains why, after a shakeup, OLPC leadership is now talking up a Windows port. Gotta get those kids hooked early. If they get the notion that it's permissible, or even desirable, to tinker with the system at every level to solve third-world problems that no first-world denizen would never anticipate, why, then... they'd never learn to appreciate the advantages of Windows.

Whatever they are...

2008-05-05T23:59:00.015-04:00

Hillary keeps on bringing the stupid. Her latest:

"We're going to go right at OPEC," Clinton said, on a last-minute campaign swing ahead of Tuesday's Indiana and North Carolina primary clashes against her Democratic rival Barack Obama.

"They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world," Clinton said, sparking cheers in a crowded fire station.

So, what's going to stop them?

Clinton has said she would amend US anti-trust law to allow the US to confront OPEC...

The Yale law school grad is proposing to somehow make US antitrust law binding on foreign governments. A bold stroke --- but so was the Charge of the Light Brigade. Does she, perhaps, have a backup plan?

... and also promised to tackle the group through the World Trade Organisation, if she is elected president.

So, let's consider. What the WTO can do, if one member accuses another of unfair trade practices, is authorize trade sanctions. The usual thing is that the victim (apparently, us) gets to raise tariffs on the miscreant nation's products. But since our only major import from most of these countries is oil, that would amount to raising the tax on gas (and other petroleum by-products), which she just proposed to lower. So, perhaps she's got another idea?

Well, an alternative sort of trade sanction might be to slap some kind of export duty on whatever it is that these countries buy from us. Which would either punish these countries, if they kept on buying from us --- or punish our exporters, as the OPEC members went on to buy whatever-it-is from somebody else. Like, say, France, whose president has been going on international trips lately with an entourage of CEOs hunting up business, including a much-publicized trip a few months back to the oil patch.

She's got a gun with a laser sight, and two of her toes are already gone. Stop her, before she shoots again!

More: Hillary supporter Sen. Robert Menendez on MSNBC: "Thank god that we don't have economists making, necessarily, public policy...". Gee, I wonder what Ben Bernanke would have to say about that?

By the way, OPEC countries are only producing 40% of the world's oil at this point, and many of them, including the biggie, Saudi Arabia, don't seem to have a whole lot of spare capacity. And the non-OPEC 60% are widely assumed to be pumping flat out. Economists, with their confusing, elitist, chardonnay-sipping discourse about "supply" and "demand", might suggest that there isn't a whole lot anyone can do under these circumstances to lower the price. But Hillary knows better. She learned the value of courage and firm resolve facing down those snipers in Tuzla...

2008-05-04T20:13:00.014-04:00

And now, my disappointments with Hillary:

This morning, George Stephanopoulos began his televised interview with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by asking if she could name a single economist who supported her plan for a gas-tax suspension.

Mrs. Clinton did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on the ABC program “This Week.” A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

Look. This isn't hard. The supply of gas over the summer is basically fixed; refineries are running flat out, and can't quickly add capacity. Retailers won't respond to more demand by selling more gas --- because they can't. So, what does happen? They keep raising the price of the stuff they have until they can no longer sell it all. So, for lack of any other rationing system, the free market effectively rations the stuff by willingness to pay. And, as Paul Krugman explains:

... if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. [Emphasis added.] Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount.

The plan won't save ordinary folks a dime. And some of them aren't fooled:

Stephanopoulos turned the mike over to a woman who said she supported Obama and said she makes less than $25,000 a year.

"I do feel pandered to when you talk about suspending the gas tax," the woman said, adding: "Call me crazy but I actually listen to economists because I think they know what they've studied."

So, what of Hillary herself? She's touting a plan that's nonsense the way Dubya's war plans were nonsense; the reasons it can't work are widely acknowledged facts which aren't seriously disputed by anyone with relevant knowledge.

Perhaps, after days of publicly touting this proposal, she still doesn't know she's selling snake oil. Or maybe she knows, but doesn't care. But either way, in now flatly rejecting the very notion of expert advice (to the astonishment of some experts who thought they were advising her), she has left the reality based community.

Note: last paragraph edited late; the point was getting lost. Also, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the argument here because there are points --- like so-called "Washington consensus" policy on the economic management of developing countries, where there is at least a rough consensus among economists that I'd dispute. But in those cases, you can find prominent experts, like Joseph Stiglitz, who dispute the consensus. This is confusion of a different order. She's just getting simple sums wrong, and blowing smoke when called on it.

2008-04-30T08:52:00.011-04:00

Repentant ex-wingnut John Cole asks:

Where do these wingnuts come up with this perception ... that Obama supporters are somehow unaware that Barack Obama is GASP a politician[?]

He is a United States Senator. He is running for the highest political office in the land. He is a politician. We are aware of this.

One reason might be that many Obama supports seem demonstrably unaware of the kind of politician he is --- one who seems to be every bit as inclined towards "triangulation" on domestic economic issues as Clinton's husband, and who is, on some issues, clearly to her right.

The key example is health care, where Clinton supports a general mandate, and Obama doesn't --- a position he holds firmly enough that, for instance, it reportedly cost him an Edwards endorsement a few months back. (Elizabeth Edwards apparently has a lot to say about this, and she'll be a health care maven for as long as she can, for obvious reasons.) Mind you, Obama's position isn't even coherent --- in one debate, he whined about the difficulty of enforcing a mandate, even though (as Hillary pointed out) his own plan has a limited mandate, for kids, to which the same objections would apply.

What's really telling is the outrage from the more, well... devoted Obama supporters when liberal commentators like Paul Krugman call him on this sort of thing. Krugman in particular was subjected to, among other things, a ridiculous rumor that he was a closet agitator for Hillary because his kid was working on her campaign staff. He doesn't have kids. And his cats, he claims, are completely non-partisan. But you'll just have to take his word for it.

To be sure, Obama himself wasn't directly putting out this sort of nonsense. But his supporters were, and Krugman is prominent enough that past a certain point, the candidate ought to have known about it. He could have certainly, at least, damped down the volume by putting out a statement highlighting the importance of respecting differences of opinion across the ideological spectrum, including more liberal commenters and colleagues --- but so far, at least, he's using that kind of language mainly when he's trying to ingratiate himself with, for instance, Republicans who are touting a phony social security "crisis" as an excuse for dismantling the program completely.

And you're reading all this on the blog of a guy who regards Obama as the best available candidate. Hillary's engaged in plenty of flim-flam of her own (and Krugman's called her on some of it), including the much-ridiculed Walter Mitty tale of dodging snipers in Tuzla, and her flat misrepresentation of her own position on NAFTA during her husband's administration. Her foreign policy positions are notably more hawkish, and her record in some respects is scary. (Like the vote to authorize use of force in Iraq --- she keeps saying "if I knew then what I know now", and that just doesn't cut it. Half her Democratic colleagues did know enough to oppose it then. Why didn't she? Perhaps because she didn't even read the National Intelligence Estimate?) And even on health care, she's an advocate of good policy, but not clearly an effective one. As I've said before, the single most important fact about her effort during her husband's administration is that it failed.

But Obama is, at best, the better of two imperfect choices. He's not the magic negro from some cheesy hollywood thumb-sucker, whose mere ascendance to office will, by itself, change, well... whatever pisses you off. People who have convinced themselves he's that, or even some kind of economic progressive in the Edwards mold, are setting themselves up for disappointment.

2008-04-28T09:23:00.003-04:00

Today in the New York Times, the story of Debbie Almontaser, who had a dream of a school named for the Lebanese Christian writer Khalil Gibran, in which students of all ethnicities and faiths would learn Arabic language and culture.

Naturally, this got her branded a fundamentalist jihaddist by the mob that forced her out of the job.

If spreading fundmentalist doctrine was, in fact, Almontaser's intent, it really wasn't working out. Accounts of the school's discipline problems during Almontaser's brief tenure include a non-Muslim student calling a Muslim teacher a "terrorist". And, to be fair, those discipline problems do suggest something about the school's leadership had gone awry.

But, say the critics, that's not the point. The point is that she's Muslim, and Muslims are the Borg, and if we don't watch out, we will be assimilated. Or something like that. As Daniel Pipes, the intellectually credentialled thug (Ph.D., Harvard, 1978) who led the charge, explains:

Mr. Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law. ...

“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Mr. Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam.”

Never mind that the real radical Muslims in New York had been thoroughly put off by Ms. Almontaser's ties to Jewish groups. And why should anyone mind that? Pipes certainly didn't care much:

In [Pipes's] article in The Sun, he referred to Ms. Almontaser by her birth name, Dhabah, and called her views “extremist.” He cited an article in which she was quoted as saying about 9/11, “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.” (As The Jewish Week later reported, Mr. Pipes left out the second half of the quote: “Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion.”)

You know, I can't even figure out how the first half of the quote can possibly be read as support for the attacks, or militancy of any kind, but then again, I don't have the credentials of a Pipes. (Or the family history; his father was Richard Pipes, who built a fine career exaggerating the Soviet threat. Windmill-tilting may run in the blood. Or it may just be the family business.)

But, on the other hand, the critics do have a point. Muslims who come here have to adapt themselves to America --- a land where religious advocacy on points of law and "faith based" governance generally may only be practiced by radical fundamentalist Christians.

2008-04-28T09:10:00.001-04:00

Swept by the Rays. What the devil?

2008-04-17T15:50:00.002-04:00

The lefty blogosphere is unanimous: ABC's democratic primary debate yesterday was a flop. The moderators asked questions about trivial issues, and generally stuck to the Republican party line.

Which left me wondering: One of those moderators was George Stephanopoulos, one of the Clinton administration's high functionaries in a previous job. Why would he do this?

Then I remembered what his old boss and his wife's whole campaign have been doing for the past three weeks. I need to get more sleep. There's really no mystery.

2008-04-15T10:04:00.000-04:00

When you hire Red Sox fans to build the new Yankee Stadium, strange things are going to happen. Once such individual apparently figured he could curse the Yankees by burying a David Ortiz jersey in the Yankee Stadium foundations.

Regrettably, the guy's mojo seems to have some serious blowback. With the Ortiz jersey buried in Yankee cement, Ortiz himself started off the season in the worst slump of his career. And now that Yankee management has helpfully dug the damn thing out of the concrete, he hit 2 for 5 in Monday's game and looked a whole lot more comfortable at the plate.

It's not the worst mistake Yankee management has made over the past few years. They've got Carl Pavano to live down for a while yet...

2008-04-14T09:37:00.002-04:00

Thesis:

The first thought that comes to mind when we discover that our hot chocolate comes directly from slave labor suggests that we boycott Ivory Coast cocoa. But this decision would not help free thousands of young slaves like Drissa. On the contrary, it could make their lives much worse and harm honest farmers as well.
--- Loretta Napoleoni, in her new book "Rogue Economics"

Antithesis:

If I had to say something to them, it would not be nice words. ... They are eating my flesh.
--- Freed slave from an Ivorian plantation, quoted here

Synthesis:

So, what are the moral obligations of Westerners who just don't like chocolate? If none of us did, one might argue that the commerce would dry up, and fewer plantation owners would be around to pay traffickers for kidnapped kids from Mali --- a possibility that Napoleoni doesn't seem to want to address. But granting her point, for the sake of argument, she still doesn't go as far as suggesting that people who just don't like chocolate are somehow obliged to keep buying Ivorian-sourced stuff (and if you have to ask, it's probably Ivorian) just to keep the slave labor plantations in business, cramped quarters, overseers, back-breaking labor, whips, beatings, and their various other accoutrements familiar from accounts of the antebellum south. We can make our choices on other grounds. The fair-trade certified stuff I buy in my local chi-chi boutique doesn't taste better than Hershey's because there's less flesh and blood in it. It's just better chocolate.

Of course, there's no shortage of muddled thinking in defense of the status quo --- like this guy, who somehow misses the seemingly elementary point that high "fair trade premium" prices are only available to farmers who agree to the code of conduct. (To further clarify for the somewhat irony-challenged "Sophomorik", that means an explicit ban on the sort of abusive labor practicies --- kidnapping, whippings, enslavement, and so forth --- that are the primary subject of this blog post; it's not just about higher prices.)

2008-04-11T10:20:00.003-04:00

Wal-Mart is famed for its hardball tactics negotiating with vendors. Including, it seems the contractor they hired to store videotapes of their internal meetings. In fact, they've played such hardball with their former custodians that they have now been outbid for access to their own archive by the plaintiffs of lawsuits against them.

Under other circumstances, I'd be upset about the breach of trust here. But these are two companies that clearly deserve each other, and I'm pleased to say that they make a fine couple.

2008-04-11T09:52:00.005-04:00

The past, they say, is another country. Elizabeth Warren visited 1978. Life is better there.

If you don't have time to sit through the whole hour (and shaving off the five minute intro doesn't help), here's a summary:

The typical family then (couples with two kids) was saving for retirement. The typical family now has no net savings, and is deeply in hock.
Most families had only one income, but they only needed one. Two-income families these days need both incomes just to make the mortgage payment; if either is unemployed for long, they lose the house, so they're doubly at risk.
The portion of income devoted to fixed and inelastic expenses like transportation and shelter was roughly 50%; it's now more like 75%. There are more cheap trinkets to buy with what's left, so long as you have it --- but losing 35% of income, once a major inconvenience, has become a calamity.
Public education and a high school degree used to be enough for a kid to attain a middle class lifestyle. Now preschool and college are effectively required --- and expensive.
Health insurance is less common, less available, and just covers less.
And so on. And so on. And so on.

Many people are old enough to remember that life --- if not from having lived it themselves, then from having lived in the homes of their parents. I guess they're too busy scraping by to complain much about what they have now. And so, panglossian economists get to tell us that since this was all the result of choices made by free people in a free market, it necessarily follows that the cheap trinkets we've gained are a more than adequate compensation for the ease we have lost.

via Mark Thoma

2008-04-11T09:42:00.002-04:00

And, speaking of other countries, there is once again Real Housewives of New York. Bethenny's camera-crew suffering boyfriend is now suffering seriously --- he's lost his job because, says his employer, they're offended that he'd choose to appear on the "tawdry" show. (The tawdry appearance in question was apparently at a charity function he was involved with, and not the later episode in which Bethenny's camera crew ambushed him on a date.)

They said it was reality television. Reality isn't pretty.

2008-04-09T08:06:00.005-04:00

In Dubya's first term, when the nation was still high on testosterone fumes, he called himself "Commander in Chief" so often that the job title "President" started to seem passé.

Now, of course, whenever anyone questions his strategy in Iraq, he's just following orders from General David Petraeus.

So, it's naturally of interest to know what Petraeus has to say in Congress. You can find plenty of it detected, selected, and rejected on other blogs. As for myself, my attention was regrettably diverted by other matters of pressing national interest (and if the home opener isn't of pressing interest to Red Sox nation, I don't know what is) --- but I did catch a bit of the beginning, and was rather struck by the exchange between Petraeus and Senator Carl Levin.

On one point, Petraeus stonewalled for a while before finally admitting that the coalition of Iranian-sponsored militias that we're calling an Iraqi government had "not adequately planned and prepared" their attack on the rival militia of Muqtada al-Sadr. (To summarize briefly: they attacked, and quickly got humiliated, as a lot of their own force either refused to fight or defected to the Sadrist side. After a week, Sadr graciously allowed them to stop, having conceded nothing.)

So, how's our own planning for, say, the further troop withdrawals that everyone says they'd like to see if the "surge" actually creates the conditions of political stability that it was supposed to? After a comical exchange about how long he'd need to just "assess" the situation (three months? four months? more? Petraeus wouldn't say), we get this:

LEVIN: Now, next question, if all goes well -- if all goes well, what would be the approximate number of our troops there at the end of the year?
Let's assume conditions permitted things to move quickly. What, in your estimate, would be the approximate number of American troops there at the end of the year?
Can you give us a -- just say if you can't give us an estimate.
PETRAEUS: Sir, I can't -- I can't give you an estimate on that.

So, it would appear that there is no plan.

Unless, of course, the plan is to leave the troops all in on any excuse, and pass the buck...

2008-04-07T10:25:00.014-04:00

Via BoingBoing, we learn that the science of psychohistory is coming!

We are in a period analogous to the early 1970s, when developments like the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Black-Scholes equation transformed finance, changing it from an art to a science, and opening enormous new markets in the process. Now, new equations describing “crowd dynamics” are about to change our lives. And not always for the better. This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious.

Particularly if the models don't work.

In more words:

In order to make a mathematical model like Black-Scholes work, you need to make simplifying assumptions. And once you've accepted the models as real and useful, the assumptions, or the fact that they were assumptions, can be forgotten. Witness this clinker in Charles Morris's generally excellent (and highly critical) book on what the self-described "science of finance" has wrought, "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown":

Such arbitrage strategies are usually quite safe. It makes no difference if [relative] bond prices rise or fall, so long as the relative prices of [certain short term bonds] move closer together. Occasionally, they don't, but Black-Scholes tells you those are rare occurrences.

In fact, it's an assumption of the Black-Scholes model that there are no arbitrage opportunities. Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't, but either way, Black-Scholes itself has nothing to say about the matter, or the viability of arbitrage in general. (If anything, the "no arbitrage opportunities" assumption may appear true in the real world only because when arbitrage opportunities do arise --- and they do --- a real arb generally comes along to wipe them out.)

And, as I've already mentioned, a similar mistake is at the heart of the mortgage-backed security mess. These securities were rated on the assumption that even in a pool of risky mortgages, you wouldn't see all the loans defaulting, all at once. Mass defaults happened to be the predictable response to a predictable situation --- a rise in interest rates --- but since it wasn't in their model, the raters had an excuse for pretending it just wouldn't happen.

Turn now to Steve Steinberg's blog post on psychohistory, which presents the white hope:

It shows up, for example, in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, the best-selling albeit thinly-plotted space opera, in which protagonist Hari Seldon develops the science of “psychohistory”. According to Seldon, just as physics can predict the mass motion of a gas, even though any individual molecule is unpredictable, psychohistory allows us to predict the future of large groups of people.

Reading about it like that, you could almost forget Seldon was fictional. But again, the models are only as good as their assumptions.

Sometimes, those assumptions may be pretty safe. One of Steinberg's sample models concerns the behavior of a crowd trying to get through a narrow doorway. The crowd's motivations are simple, the constraints are largely physical, and the results are probably pretty good.

But in messier situations, things are a lot more tenuous.

Steinberg's very worried about what the largely military sponsors of this research will do with it if it works.

Me, I'm more worried with what happens if it doesn't.

"Yeah, Iraq was a mess. But this situation is different. Our models say so. We have mathematical proof!"

2008-04-04T11:21:00.006-04:00

At this point, we're down to three mainstream Presidential candidates, and while most of us have a preference by now, we might still wish for another choice. In that spirit, I give you the prospective head of the Libertarian ticket, Mike Gravel --- a crazy candidate for crazy times:

If I thought his State of the Union addresses would be like this, I might just vote for the guy.

2008-04-03T23:31:00.009-04:00

Has the mortgage crisis shaken your confidence in the financial acumen of the folks running the banks? Well, maybe this will restore your faith. They may be hurting, but they haven't panicked. Instead, under pressure, with cool heads and eagle eyes, they've found a way to economize:

In some cities that have low property values, where there are dense concentrations of foreclosures, you see lenders who file foreclosure proceedings but don't actually take control of the properties, because the lenders have to maintain them and pay taxes on them.

Now, there are a few questions that bear asking about this novel economy measure. Like, if the bank hasn't taken title to the house, why do the impecunious former owners have to leave? Well, consider everyone else who's involved. There's a slow economy, and people need jobs:

... a small army of law firms and default servicing companies, who represent mortgage lenders, have been raking in mounting profits. These little-known firms assess legal fees and a host of other charges, calculate what the borrowers owe and draw up the documents required to remove them from their homes. ...

Court documents say that some of the largest firms in the industry have repeatedly submitted erroneous affidavits when moving to seize homes and levied improper fees that make it harder for homeowners to get back on track with payments. Consumer lawyers call these operations “foreclosure mills.”

Consider it part of the stimulus program.

For what it's worth, I have yet to find a better answer to that legal conundrum in this comment thread on the story, from Barry Ritholtz's blog, though more than one person has asked. But you will find all sorts of other amusements. Like a mortgage broker explaining why he's blameless for any bad loans that he issued. The government made him do it!

As someone who has worked in the mortgage industry, I believe that it is patently unfair to say that lenders should be held responsible for foreclosures. Government programs made it possible for large amounts of people previously afford it to buy homes. The government did everything in their power to encourage this type of lending. As a result, many people who were deserving were suddenly able to buy a home. An unfortunate side affect [sic] of this is that many other undeserving people took advantage of the generous terms of the government's offer. I can testify from personal experience that it is impossible to tell if a person will pay or not. You can look at their credit scores or listen to what they say, but in the end all you have is a very fleeting impression of how that person behaves when they are over their head and terrified.I have no doubt that this is not the reason every one of these homes has been foreclosed on. There are many unscrupulous lenders. However there are at least as many legitimate lenders who try their best to make good loans. Holding these peoples defaults against them only reduces the responsibility of the many many people who took advantage of the system. Also most mortgage companies levy penalties on lenders for every mortgage they make that defaults.

It's true. The government made lenders stop redlining. And this guy's not the only one saying that that's why they stopped doing credit checks as well. Mind you, the government wasn't telling them to stop doing credit checks. But there were things they could do, and things they couldn't do anymore and it all got just so confusing.

So confusing that they didn't even wonder: if you know the prospective buyer's likely to wind up "over their head and terrified", maybe the ethical thing is to just tell them the whole thing's a bad idea, and not give them a loan.

Poor fellows.

More: Again via Ritholtz, some banks are doing the sensible thing, and just not foreclosing on properties that they couldn't sell right now anyway. It's the right thing to do, but nevertheless, it does have the consequence that even the current skyrocketing foreclosure rates are understating just how bad housing really is right now...

2008-04-03T23:20:00.003-04:00

A number of pro-Clinton bloggers are getting very worked up about Florida and Michigan. Among other things, they profess to be totally mystified why scheduling rules violations in these two states cost them the right to seat delegations, while other (more minor) violations of the same rules in other states caused nowhere near the same penalty.

Well, let me clear that up for them. That's happening because that's what a committee with one of Clinton's top advisors on it voted to do. And he voted in favor of the proposal.

They also say they're very upset about the voters in those states being disenfranchised. Strangely, they don't seem nearly so worked up about the Obama supporters in Michigan who were effectively disenfranchised because he'd honored the Democratic HQ's request to take his name off the ballot, and Hillary didn't.

2008-04-02T10:07:00.009-04:00

From Eric Alterman's New Yorker piece on the sad fate of American newspapers:

Despite the many failures at newspapers, the vast majority of reporters and editors have devoted years, even decades, to understanding the subjects of their stories. It is hard to name any bloggers who can match the professional expertise, and the reporting, of, for example, the Post ’s Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, or the Times’ Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin.

Well, gee. Let me try this.

Economics:

Law and Civil liberties:

Physics:

Middle East Politics:

Baseball (a nonpartisan list!):

And that's enough to make the point, though I could go on quite a bit longer, in each of these fields and plenty of others (biology, French politics, you name it). On almost any topic, there's a genuine, experienced, even formally credentialed expert blogging about it who has spent large chunks of their life wholly devoted to the field, and who has more, and more interesting, things to say about it than anyone who spent equal chunks of their life hanging around a newsroom.

I'm not trying to say here that the whole journalistic enterprise was without value, but its denizens and partisans, like Alterman, won't help preserve it by maintaining their willful blindness to one of the major reasons that bloggers on the internet are eating their lunch.

2008-04-02T10:02:00.004-04:00

Meanwhile, in another world, "Real Housewives of New York" continues to torture its cast for our Seinfeldesque amusement. In this week's episode: Bethenny deals with the fallout from the events of last week's show, in which she'd invited the camera crew along to a quiet tête-à-tête with her boyfriend about his commitment issues.

Regrettably, that didn't go as well as one might have hoped.

2008-03-27T00:11:00.007-04:00

The great fear of what might happen in Iraq is a pitched civil war between Shiite and Sunni militias. So, let's start with the good news: that's not happening right now. What's happening right now is that the Shiite militias are fighting each other.

So, who are these militias? Well, roughly speaking, there are two sides. One is a group of militias that started out as Iranian proxies, back when Iran and Iraq were doing their damnedest to fill the Persian Gulf with the blood of each others' soldiers. These former proxies maintain close ties to the Iranian regime. The other side, while Shiite, is led by an Iraqi with strong nationalist tendencies and a lingering deep suspicion of Iran.

Given the way Dubya's crew is still trying to blame Iran for everything that goes wrong in Iraq, it's only natural that we're on the side of the Iranian puppets.

So, why are we on the side of these guys --- al-Dawa, and the Badr brigades of the former SCIRI, whose political wings are the backbone of the government we have endorsed? Matthew Yglesias suggests that we oppose the nationalist (Muqtada al-Sadr, much vilified in the American press for having backed armed attacks on civilians, which is also a favored pastime of the people we support) because he's popular enough to rule the country without our assistance, and we want puppet rulers that need us. It's not that Matt particularly likes the policy (nor do I), but he's still taking a more favorable view of the occupation than I do. Given that we're putting out stuff like this:

The Pentagon on Wednesday said an eruption of violence in southern Iraq, where US-backed government forces were battling Shiite militias, was a "by-product of the success of the surge."

I have trouble believing that they've put in that much coherent thought...

More: Yglesias now relays another explanation --- that we don't want to speak to the Sadrists because they don't speak English, and Iran's best friends, by happenstance, do. Now that's the kind of clear thought I expect from our Republican leadership...

2008-03-25T10:00:00.003-04:00

The Red Sox won their season opener a few minutes ago, despite a very shaky outing from closer Jonathan Papelbon. (It was a night game --- in Japan). Watching Manny Ramirez getting interviewed through an interpreter by the Japanese press is a hoot; the game featured a classic "Manny being Manny" moment, when he blasted a ball that might have been out of the park, paused at the plate to admire it --- and then had to scoot off late when it didn't go out. He made it to second.

The TV post-game theme music is the opening synth riffs from "The Grand Illusion". Is somebody trying to tell us something?

2008-03-25T00:11:00.000-04:00

Hillary Clinton has proposed an "emergency group" including Alan Greenspan to deal with the credit crunch that's occurring as the real estate bubble pops. Of course, if Greenspan were the sort who were inclined to do something about it, he might have done that while he was running the Fed. Instead he cheered the bubble on, actually touting risky adjustable-rate mortgages when fixed rates were stunningly low, and refusing to look into lending practices that were clearly out of line. He made the mess, Clinton seems to argue; who better to clean it up?

Well, if that doesn't sway you, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News reports that she now has another argument in favor of Greenspan:

... he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach. I think it would be wise to include him.

Delphic oracle. Calming. OK. Would that be this Delphic oracle?

After sacrificing 300 head of cattle to Apollo, Croesus had gold and silver melted down into 117 bricks, which he sent to Delphi along with jewels, statues, and a gold bowl weighing a quarter of a ton.

With these gifts, Croesus sent his question of whether he should attack Persia. The Pythia answered that, if he went to war, "Croesus will destroy a great empire." Encouraged by this response, he invaded Persia, only to be decisively beaten in battle. The Persians invaded and conquered Lydia and captured Croesus. Imprisoned by the Persians, Croesus bitterly denounced the Delphic oracle for having deceived him. After receiving permission from his captors, Croesus sent his iron chains to Delphi with the question, "Why did you lie to me?" The Pythia answered that her prediction had been fulfilled. Croesus had destroyed a great empire -- his own.

I feel calmer already.

2008-03-25T00:10:00.008-04:00

And now for something completely different.

A couple of years ago, an MIT student of my acquaintance had a brief run-in with reality TV, in the form of a recruiter for "Beauty and the Geek". Faced with a remarkably persistent hollywood type with a clipboard and a questionnaire, he decided the quickest way out was through, and obligingly filled out the form, including the question (surely of immense use to the producers), "What is your greatest fear?" His response: "Being made to look like an ass on national TV by the producers of some dumb reality TV show."

What brings this to mind is Bravo's new series, "The Real Housewives of New York". Each episode begins with Alex McCord, an actress, graphic designer, and aspiring (oh, how breathlessly aspiring) socialite, intoning that "To a certain group of people in New York, status is everything." The rest of the hour is devoted to making five of them, including McCord herself, look ridiculous.

Not, mind you, that the women themselves make this terribly difficult. The one who seems most down-to-earth, oddly enough, is LuAnn de Lesseps, a countess by marriage who cheerfully flaunts the title at every opportunity. (She's got her own TV show, broadcast on UHF in the Hamptons, called "The Countess Report".) LuAnn at least knows how to enjoy being privileged. The rest are shown, in no doubt carefully selected awkward moments, carrying on like the characters from Seinfeld --- or rather, how those people might carry on if someone mixed in a burning, insatiable hunger to see their names on the society pages, and a hearty dollop of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's $580 million real-life trust fund. It seems unnecessarily cruel to actually name whose major snits at minor slights are worthy of George Costanza in couture, or whose social scheming rises to the Krameresque. Besides which, it's just unnecessary. You'll spot them soon enough.

The producers, naturally enough, aren't doing them any favors. If the pervasive air of extravagance isn't obvious enough from the shot selection, they slap price tags on just about everything in sight, to drive the point home. (Purebred puppies are expensive! Who knew?) But when thinking about this, consider how a big-screen TV and an SUV would look to someone from Kenya. We've all got our extravagances. As for what's getting left out, you could make an interesting little video intercutting the haute couture shopping sprees (thousands for a dress for opening night at the opera!) with this "Countess Report" clip of her excellency and friends genuinely gushing over the $24.99 "killer shoes" they found at the Hamptons T.J. Maxx. And think about how plausible it is that they really never talk about anything other than themselves --- which is all that makes it to the screen.

And, of course, always remember that anything really worthwhile that anyone connected with the show might be involved with has probably been edited out.

Still and all, it would be nice to see the perspective of a few more typical New York housewives. The kind who, offered tickets to opening night at the opera, would be thrilled --- who'd show up wearing their very best $300 outfits from Macy's, and leave talking about nothing other than the music.

There were a few late edits to this piece to try to put the focus a bit more on the editing that creates the screen personae here; it's more interesting than the personae themselves...

2008-03-23T14:05:00.001-04:00

American casualties of the war in Iraq will reach 4000 any day now, perhaps by the time you read this; as I write, the offical count stands at 3996.

I took a walk yesterday around some of the more touristy sections of downtown Boston, mainly to see how the ribbon park over the new underground highway is shaping up. Behind the Old North Church, there's an impromptu memorial: a dog tag for each fallen soldier in this misbegotten war, their numbers in the thousands, hanging from a garden trellis, jangling in the wind.

2008-03-23T14:04:00.005-04:00

One story that's going around on Wall Street is that the financial industry landed itself, and us, in the fix we're all now in by erecting a massive structure of derivatives and interlocking claims which no one really understood, and which now has the effect that a collapse anywhere puts the whole structure at risk of toppling like a house of cards. Viz. the quote of the day:

Mr. Blinder, the former Fed vice chairman, holds a doctorate in economics from M.I.T. but says he has only a "modest understanding" of complex derivatives. "I know the basic understanding of how they work," he said, "but if you presented me with one and asked me to put a market value on it, I'd be guessing."

Which is to say, the soi-disant rocket scientists of Wall Street gave themselves a complicated job, and then did it badly.

Me, I'm not so sure. Some of the mistakes involved no math at all. And in cases where the math should have been easy, they still blew it badly.

To begin with, a lot of the structure was based on implicit trust in ratings agences which, as others have noted, were blowing the simple stuff. Consider "mortgage-backed securities," which is where the rot first set in. This is a field in which conventional wisdom had been that buyers who didn't put in a substantial down payment, relative to the cost of the property, were at elevated risk of default; financially, they'd have nothing to lose if they defaulted, and if the value of the property dropped at all, they'd even have something to gain. In the year 2000, as Conan O'Brien would say, Standard and Poor's decided to set aside decades, if not centuries, of experience, and say that arrangements with no down payment were not at elevated risk. By the time they went back on it, the collapse was already underway.

But beyond that, let's consider cases where a little math was involved: the now infamous mortgage-backed securities.

The basic idea of these is that when you've got a lot of risky loans with more or less similar properties, you can predict roughly what's going to happen to them in aggregate, and take advantage of that. So, let's say you think that there's between a 10% and 30% chance that any individual borrower will default. That means that 70% are very likely to keep making their payments, another 20% are in doubt, and the last 10% are toast --- but you don't know which 70%. So, how can you get certain returns? By creating a security that gets payments from whoever's still paying, up to 70%, no matter which loans those are. (So long as more than 70% of the borrowers are still paying, the other payments go to buyers of riskier "tranches" of the payment pool; when they stop, the buyers of those tranches are out of luck, but they knew they were buying concentrated risk going in.) Since you're assuming that no more than 30% of them will default, it's basically a sure shot that enough of them will keep paying to keep that first-dip revenue stream going, which is how you make an absolutely solid, AAA-rated security out of a whole bunch of individually bad loans.

That is, in fact, the basic argument for the AAA-ratings on a whole bunch of mortgage-backed securities. It's all entertainingly outlined in this well-circulated slideshow, or if you want more detail with musical accompaniment look here. And yet losses on these things are now bleeding major banks white.

So, could there be something wrong with the analysis? In fact, the argument contains an elementary mathematical error that bites a lot of people hard on the ass in probability 101. If you haven't seen it already, you might want to go back and see if you can spot it, because I'm going to spoil it for you in the next paragraph.

Here's the problem: The whole arrangement implicitly assumes that the failures of the individual loans are independent. That is, we're assuming that each borrower has between a 70% and 90% chance of keeping up with the payments whatever the others do. And the world might just not be like that. Let's suppose, instead, that there's some event --- let's say, just for kicks, a meteor strike on the town --- that might (with between 10% and 30% probability) make all of the borrowers default, all at once. In this situation, each individual loan still has the same chance of defaulting as it does if they're independent. But pooling this risk buys you nothing: if the meteor hits, the loans default all at once, and it doesn't matter how the payments have been divvied up, because they've all ceased.

That's a nice mathematical curiosity unless someone can point to events likelier than meteor strikes which might have this kind of mass effect. But by the time the real estate bubble was really going, there was such an event, which was almost certain to happen: a rise in interest rates. Lots of borrowers, particularly in the subprime range, were taking loans with variable interest rates which would "reset" up at some future date. If they couldn't pay after the reset, they'd have to sell the house fast. But, at the same time, it was common in the bubble to judge affordability by the monthly payment, and if rates go up, the same monthly payment buys you less house. So, in the event of a rise in rates, the borrower can't make the payments (because the rates have gone up), and they can't sell to a similar buyer for as much as they paid (because any similarly situated buyer can now afford less). In such a case, default is what's going to happen, because it's the only thing that can happen. To all of them. All at once.

By the way, did I mention that interest rates in mid-bubble were at historic lows, and had nowhere to go but up?

Were the soi-disant rocket scientists of Wall Street and the Connecticut hedge funds trying to defraud anyone with this stuff? I'd say probably not. As others have noted, placing big bets against nasty events is a great strategy for a fund manager, even if you're sure to lose big eventually, so long as you don't acknowledge what you're doing. (In the meantime, you get to pocket your fees, which can be colossal.) And the easiest way to do that is to convince yourself that you're doing something else that genuinely does "add value" --- which is a particularly easy job if the flaw is concealed within pages of ornate mathematical bafflegab. As someone once said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it.

I'll admit I'd be slightly more credible here if I had scribbled this down a few years ago, so I could be quoting myself now. Instead, I just decided to stay the hell out of the real estate market. But I think the argument stands on its own. [Update: Then again, here's somebody else who did call it at the time. But he's got a Ph.D. In economics!]

One last note on housing questions --- my last post on the subject got a few comments blaming people who put themselves in hock up to their eyebrows, borrowing more and more against houses they already owned to pay for vacations, fancy cars and glitzy junk. And they exist. From the depths of Orange County, IrvineRenter dredges up a spectacular examples on a regular basis. But that wasn't everybody. Probably not even most of 'em, except in isolated enclaves like Irvine (where most of the buyers weren't really subprime, though many made the same mistakes, and where there's reason to believe that the real bleeding hasn't even started yet). So, I hope before posting one of those again, folks will take a good look at a story of another type. (And yes, the poor woman signed legal papers in a language she didn't understand. She speaks Spanish, and lives in the U.S. Does she have a choice?)

2008-03-16T15:37:00.017-04:00

You've probably heard that the Fed is dealing with unusual conditions in the financial markets, but you may not be entirely sure what that means. Well, for your amusement, here's a picture of an unusual condition, as provided by the St. Louis Fed: That blue line, there, is the total amount that depository institutions (what most of us think of as "banks") have taken as loans from the Federal Reserve, their lender of last resort, which is suddenly doing a great deal of business. Very suddenly, in fact; if you look at the numbers, you see that the last few data points, as of this writing, read:

  2007-10-01   0.254
  2007-11-01   0.366
  2007-12-01  15.430
  2008-01-01  45.660
  2008-02-01  60.157

One way to get some feel for the scale of this spike is to compare it to bank reserves --- the fraction of holdings (10% or so, with some exceptions) which banks are required to keep in cash. Which is, effectively, what you get by looking at this graph of "non-borrowed reserves" (that is, actual reserves, less what the banks have borrowed from the Fed): If you read the graph carefully, you'll notice that the most recent figures are negative, at $17.6 billion below zero as of Feb. 1st (the most current figure available, as I write). There's still money in the banks, but it's borrowed.

And yet, this is not the apocalypse!

Well, at least not by itself.

To understand why, let's first remember why banks are required to hold cash reserves at all. They'd prefer to hold something else: titles to loans, bonds, other debt instruments, or (increasingly) messy derivative concoctions which represent baskets of these, or options to buy or sell them at some future time, or option contracts on baskets, or ... well, never mind. It gets weird. But the basic point is that all of these things generate income for the banks. Cash --- green paper, with picutres of dead presidents on it --- generates no income when it's sitting in a vault. Banks, being profit-making institutions (or, at the very least, hoping to be) prefer income when they can get it. But their depositors have this awkward habit of asking for green paper on a fairly regular basis, and sometimes in bunches. So, the Fed requires the banks, as a condition of doing business with consumers, to have a stash of it on hand to meet the demand as it may arise.

But while holding cash doesn't make the banks any money, borrowing actually costs them --- they have to pay interest on the loans from the Fed. Why would a bank ever do this?

Well, that's a question which may be best answered by example. Cast your mind back to the hoary days just after September 11th, 2001, when the stock market briefly went into free-fall. Traders the world over had convinced themselves (or acted as if they had --- which is all that matters here) that because two buildings had fallen down in New York, the American economy was going to implode, and that stock in companies located all over the country was suddenly worth a fraction of what it had been worth a few days before. This was totally unreasonable --- but reason wasn't part of the process. It was just a blind panic, which was over a few weeks later. But people who, for whatever reason, had to sell a lot of stock in the interim got a lot less than what it was actually worth.

Now, imagine that you were running a bank that was holding equities. (Slightly fanciful, since banks tend not to be too deep into equities, but conceivable --- and a lot of the stuff that they do commonly hold also tanked). And let's say that you had some stuff that you were planning to sell, but because of the panic, you couldn't get fair price. Well, it might make sense then to use the stuff instead (or some other stuff that you had on hand) as collateral for a loan from the Fed; that would cost you something, but not nearly as much as selling into the panic. This way you get to actually sell and repay the loan after the panic is over and prices have recovered; the loan cost you something, but not nearly as much as the loss on a panic sale.

Well, the panic right now isn't in stocks. It's in mortgage-backed securities (in effect, claims on shares of thousands of individual home mortgage payments), which no one wants to buy right now. So, rather than try to sell them, the banks are instead raising cash at the Fed borrowing window. (Or, actually, a couple of new windows; in addition to the traditional discount window, the Fed is now operating a new one called the TAF, for depository institutions, and has announced another, called the TSLF, for investment banks, which it doesn't ordinarily deal directly with at all --- with some technical safeguards.) And when the panic is over, the stuff can get sold, the loans can get paid, and we can all pretend this awkward moment just never happened.

So long as the panic ends.

The problem, here, is that unlike post-9/11 stocks, a lot of the mortgage-backed securities genuinely are unsound. They represent mortgages given to people on the expectation that the price of their houses could only go up. Prices have, instead, been dropping, and 10% of American homeowners are now "underwater" --- they owe more on their house than it is actually worth. If they wanted to sell it in the ordinary way, they'd have to bring their own check to the closing to give the lender everything they owe, so the lender would drop their lien and allow the sale. And the fraction only goes up as the prices drop. But in most states, the worst the lender could do if the homeowner instead just stops paying is to seize the house --- in which case, the homeowner writes no check and, instead, the bank takes the loss. Under the circumstances, it's pretty clear which choice makes the most sense for the home-debtor --- and if it isn't clear to them already, companies like this one are more and more eager to tell them.

So, what if the panic is justified? What might we do? Well, one option would be to try to forgive portions of the loans to people who could pay the rest, as suggested by Barney Frank. This wouldn't restore the value of the securities backed by their mortgage payments to par, and it wouldn't continue to rake in payments from speculators who bought houses just to resell them for more, and have no reason to hang on anyway; trying to rescue those mortgages would just be throwing good money after bad. (Which is why Frank's plan has qualifications set up to try to exclude these guys).

There are other plans as well, which would, for instance, allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the total amount of a mortgage. Which actually sounds like a good deal for the lender, compared to the alternative: they get only some of what they're owed, but that's better than nothing. But Dubya has already more or less announced his opposition to some of these interventions, either because it's too drastic for him, or because it helps too many poor people. If his family hedge fund is getting wiped out, why save any of the poor? Priorities!

Which brings us to the alternative: large financial institutions going belly-up. As I write, the venerable Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns is in deep trouble, and has already been given a temporary bailout by the Fed (a large loan, with J.P. Morgan/Chase acting as middleman because the TSLF isn't running yet). And yet, even if we accept that some institutions have to be treated by the government as "too big to fail", Bear, at least at first glance, just doesn't look that big. If you're not impressed by an occasionally clueless New York Times columnist with deep qualms about the deal, I'll raise you Willem Buiter, a professor at the LSE with a blog hosted by the Financial Times. By the time you read this, it may have already been sold. So, why not just let it go broke?

The closest thing I've seen to a justification, in (for instance) the comments in Buiter's blog post, is that Bear was a counterparty in enough derivative and option deals that if it failed, it would take other, bigger institutions with it. Hence, the bailout. (Perhaps just the first; rumors are swirling around Lehman as I write.)

And so, the solons of Washington declare that bailing out Bear was "the right decision", while Dubya himself declares that bailing out poor homeowners may be too risky to contemplate. And at this point, let's consider: these guys on Wall Street who are now going broke are the same ones who have, for the past few years, been defending their own huge and growing salaries by saying they were helping to produce a smoother, more efficient economy that would function better for everybody. Instead, their companies are going broke, and threatening to take the rest of us with them.

There may be a moral case for keeping the operations of Bear, Stearns going, if the alternative is that the whole tower of financial Jenga that is modern Wall Street comes crashing down. But there is no moral case for letting the people responsible escape on golden parachutes, or even letting shareholders who put equity in their operations keep much of it. If anyone deserves a bailout, it's the small homeowners who heard financial authority figures telling them for years that buying a house was a wise decision on any terms (remember Alan Greenspan personally touting risky adjustable-rate mortgage deals to prospective buyers?) only to be faced with unsustainable payments and huge financial losses (at least on the scale of an ordinary household).

And, as we've already seen, helping the homeowners would indirectly help the Wall Street institutions as well, a very great deal. Perhaps critical help, because even the Fed's current desperate measures have their limits. For obvious reasons, they're not just printing all those dollars that they're loaning to the banks, though they could; instead, they're funding those loans by selling from their stash of absolutely secure government bonds. But that hoard, while huge in ordinary terms (hundreds of billions of dollars' worth), is finite --- past a certain point, they'll have to start doing something else, perhaps something even riskier than helping the afflicted.

But Bush does seem a bit adrift...

Watching George W. Bush address the New York financial community Friday brought back many memories. Unfortunately, they were about his speech right after Hurricane Katrina, the one when he said: “America will be a stronger place for it.”
...
The president squinched his face and bit his lip and seemed too antsy to stand still. As he searched for the name of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (“the king, uh, the king of Saudi”) and made guy-fun of one of the questioners (“Who picked Gigot?”), you had to wonder what the international financial community makes of a country whose president could show up to talk economics in the middle of a liquidity crisis and kind of flop around the stage as if he was emcee at the Iowa Republican Pig Roast.

Do you think that if a Washingtonian council of elders came along to humbly explain to Dubya exactly why helping the poor might be necessary, if only to indirectly bail out the rich, he might listen? Yep. Just like the Baker commission convinced him that it was time to start reducing troop levels in Iraq.

Lots of luck. To all of us.

Update: Well, what do you know? I, and Buiter, gave the Fed too litle credit. Bear Stearns sold to J.P. Morgan/Chase for $2.00 a share, down from about $70.00 at the beginning of the week (and over $100 last summer). Close enough to zero. Also of note: employees owned one third of the shares. That has to include a lot of small fry who didn't have much to do with the fatal mistakes. You've got to hope it wasn't them that took the brunt of it... and that the real damage was concentrated on the people that deserved it.

2008-03-06T07:34:00.003-05:00

So, last I checked, Hillary's campaign desperately wanted us to believe these two things:

Among two remaining candidates with similar positions on many issues, she's the one to pick because her experience and seasoned political team make her "ready to lead on day one".
Results in caucus states should be ignored because they only reflect the organizational advantage of the Obama campaign, which has left her seasoned political team in the dust.

Hillary's big argument is experience. But experience is only worth what you learn from it, and in 2002, Hillary was saying that "eight years of experience" had taught her that, at the very least, Dubya deserved the benefit of the doubt when it came to the WMD case for invading Iraq. And her other claims to foreign policy experience are even more dubious.

Domestically, her major claim to experience is her health care expertise. But the single most important fact about that reform effort is that it failed. On substantive points, the case for reform was excellent, but she couldn't make it stick then --- just as now, in the last debate, she couldn't convincingly explain the differences between her (superior) health care plan and Obama's, despite what seemed like ten minutes of trying. (And while Obama's slightly deceptive fudging of that issue has bothered me for a while now, Hillary's fudging of her position on NAFTA during her husband's administration is just as bad, so she doesn't even have that in her favor any more.)

As for Obama, he doesn't have any really significant bills at the federal level. Nor does Hillary — because as long as either one has been in the Senate, Republicans have been running the show. (Over the last two years, because Harry Reid has been letting them, but there we are.) At the state level, though, he does have the bill mandating taping of all police interrogations in Illinois — which got passed nearly unanimously despite strong initial opposition. It's only one major legislative win — but that's one more than Hillary has in all her years of so-called "experience."

In a general election, it's not hard to see what one attack on Hillary might be: that her vaunted claims to "experience" are empty; that they amount to nothing more than years getting her face on TV. It's a "phony candidate" claim potentially as nasty, in its own way, as the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry — with the added advantage, as Kissinger once said, of being true.

2008-03-02T09:14:00.002-05:00

The latest from Attorney General Michael Mukasey: he won't prosecute two ex-administration officials for contempt of Congress because their refusal to testify had been authorized by the President, who has taken the doctrine of "executive privilege" to mean that he can declare just about any inconvenient fact to be outside of Congressional purview. If that rips the guts out of Congress's power to oversee the executive branch, what of it? That self-same Congress ripped the guts out of habeas corpus a few years ago, so they can hardly stand on principle now.

A few weeks ago, I noted the dilemna faced by our majority-Democratic Senate in Mukasey's confirmation hearings:

... there were those who quibbled on such minor things as his refusal to say clearly whether one of the Spanish Inquisition's favorite torture techniques was actually torture. They believed that the Democrats needed to stand firm and demand that Mukasey show he clearly believed in accountability and the long-established principles of the rule of law. But these impractical idealists were confronted with the pragmatic realities of the situation: if they failed to confirm Mukasey, we'd all be stuck with a time-serving former deputy of the disgraced Alberto Gonzales, who would do Dubya's bidding and nothing else.

At the time, I didn't think the vote had made much of a practical difference. But it seems I was wrong. If anyone in Congress complains about Mukasey now, Dubya and his minions can point out in unaccustomed candor that Congressional Democrats approved the son of a bitch.

2008-02-29T08:18:00.010-05:00

You'd think that renters wouldn't feel the direct effects of the American mortgage crisis. You'd be wrong. As prices drop, and soi-disant "investors" find themselves owing more on their "investment property" than it is now worth, more and more of them are going to foreclosure, letting the bank take the property --- and the loss. And the first thing the bank does? Evict the tenant. Even shut off the utilities to force them out. As one real estate lawyer explains:

Banks don't want to manage a property. They foreclose and then they sell it. The risk they're exposed to, they take over this property, if there's heating issues, if there's, you know, housing code violations, that can be big money and legal fees.

But if they can't sell it, then what?

A landlord once explained to me that you want to have a tenant in a place not just for the rent, but so that the place gets cleaned, and so there's someone there to tell you about problems early, before they get expensive. That must have been one dumb landlord, because the smart guys at the banks know it's much better to have the property vacant and falling down, like the foreclosed-on properties all over one Cleveland neighborhood, with

...street after empty street of boarded-up houses, their roofs caving in, collapsed balconies hanging from the fronts of buildings. ...

Bins and rubbish litter the street. Signs warn trespassers the structures are unsafe. People have spray-painted “No copper” or “No metal” on their doors to deter crooks who have stripped anything of value from these decaying shells. Even brick steps have been ripped off, leaving houses that look as if they are floating on a dark sea of garbage.

Now, that's the kind of thing that preserves value --- the value of a good night's sleep. The neighborhood drug addicts may sell the furnace in pieces to some scrap metal dealer, but the bankers will never get any of those annoying late night phone calls that the place doesn't have any heat.

By the way, on the off chance that anyone reading this is in property management, with a friend at a mortgage service company, this is a growth market --- or it will be, once they come to their senses. Go for it. The status quo isn't good for anybody...

2008-02-18T23:40:00.003-05:00

The latest charge against Barack Obama from the Clinton camp: some of the language in his speeches was originally written by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

The contrast with Clinton herself couldn't be clearer. Her speechwriters are a lot less distinguished.

Revised footnote: It's worth noting that Obama had Patrick's permission to use his words; that was emphatically not the case when Joe Biden got into trouble. And Hillary's folks don't deny that she does the same thing..

2008-02-17T14:01:00.007-05:00

Compare and contrast. From the news section of today's New York Times:

Senator John McCain’s vote last week against a bill to curtail the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of harsh interrogation tactics disappointed human rights advocates who consider him an ally and led Democrats to charge that he was trying to please Republicans as he seeks to rally them around his presidential bid.

And from Nick Kristof's editorial, on today's op-ed page:

Consider torture. There was nary a vote in the Republican primary to be gained by opposing the waterboarding of swarthy Muslim men accused of terrorism. But Mr. McCain led the battle against Dick Cheney on torture, even though it cost him donations, votes and endorsements.
Even more than his time as a prisoner in Hanoi, that marked Mr. McCain’s most heroic moment. He risked his political career to protect Muslim terror suspects who constitute the most despised and voiceless people in America.

McCain's position on torture, in sum: he will risk his career by standing tall on the barricades against the Bush administration's depredations, right up until the moment when whatever he's doing might make an actual difference.

And now we start to see why so many Republicans are ticked off at McCain, even though he's got the nomination sewn up, for all practical purposes. In this matter, at least, he could be a mainstream Democrat.

Added later: To give credit where it's due: On a different matter, FISA immunity, the Democratic House leadership (though not the Senate) may be showing some unaccustomed backbone. It's too soon to tell. I still remember the first significant vote after the Dems took over Congress, in which they sent up a bill requiring Dubya to certify progress in order to keep the troops in Iraq --- a toothless measure to begin with --- and then promptly passed another with no conditions at all when even this casual nod to the power of Congress was too much for Dubya to accept.

2008-02-14T08:59:00.002-05:00

If the aftermath of the writers' strike has left you jonesing for that season of 24 you missed, head over to Draft Bloomberg. The latest addition to their web site is a slickly produced youtube video which borrows the show's graphic tics, starting off with a ticking countdown on that fuzzy red clock, with a bomb blast thrown in for good measure. Time is running out, you see --- Mike Bloomberg has only ten days or so to decide whether he's entering the presidential race, and if we don't get down on our knees right now and lick his ... petition, he might not come and save us.

Mind you, the thing does flag in production values toward the middle. The folks who were hired to read lines like "Will we have a President who owes nothing to the lobbyists and special interests?" can't seem to muster any real conviction. And it's hard to blame them --- as a billionaire mogul from the news biz, Bloomberg owes nothing to the special interests because he is one himself. (By the by, isn't a career in one industry a bit too limited to let him claim mastery, on that basis alone, of the economy as a whole? But wait, it isn't him making that claim. It's an entirely separate organization which is seeking to influence him, but which has gotten the money to produce its slick videos and publicity from magical elves.)

It's easy to dismiss this page-15 political news as comic relief to the horror shows that are continually playing on page one. (We have a torture debate. We are debating the merit of torture. And whether the President should be able to give vast and powerful companies a secret free license to break the law.) But before you do, watch that video again, and notice how Bloomberg is being pitched as an alternative to "the bickering in Washington". Bickering is the lifeblood of democracy. What Bloomberg's team is saying in this video (or, if you like, his unaffiliated magical elves) is that they stand for something else.

2008-02-12T19:24:00.002-05:00

So, the big argument in favor of Hillary Clinton is experience leading to judgment. Of course, experience is only worth what you learn from it. So, it's a little unsettling that Hillary still won't say flatly that voting to let Dubya invade Iraq was a mistake. The closest she's come is "If I knew then what I know now..." --- which really begs the question. I knew the vote was a mistake at the time it was cast. Why didn't she?

The corresponding argument against Obama is that he lacks executive experience. But then again, Hillary's most recently been in the legislature, for not much longer than Obama, and her executive turn managing health-care reform in her husband's administration was less than a total success. So, it's relevant to note that over the past year or two, they've both been running pretty much the same sort of organization --- a large presidential campaign. So, how have they done?

Obama's done pretty well. From having a low national profile, he's achieved a level of success which I think it's fair to say that no one outside his inner circle would have expected a year ago. As for Hillary, we have an organization which began convinced of the inevitability of its own success, staffed by people chosen more for their loyalty than competence, which planned for a swift, early success, and now seems adrift when that success failed to materialize.

Sound familiar?

Personally, I'll vote for whichever one of these guys wins the Democratic nomination, and I'm not entirely happy with either --- Obama's Harry and Louise act on health care is really ticking me off. But if Hillary's supporters think that experience is the reason to support her, it's that same experience --- and, as I said up top, her apparent failure to learn the right lessons from it --- which is leading me to prefer just about any sane alternative...

2008-02-03T22:25:00.000-05:00

You know, it was getting a little tiresome hearing the Imperial Death March in my head every time I saw the local football team...

More: I guess that's the last time Tom Brady ever questions the defensive prowess of Plaxico Burress. No, Tom, not 17 points. Not quite.

2008-01-31T23:08:00.000-05:00

Michael Mukasey is our new Attorney General. So, how did he do on his first oversight hearing? Quoth Greenwald:

He repeatedly endorsed patently illegal behavior -- including torture -- and refused even to pretend that he cared what the Senate thought about any of it. He even told Republican Senators that they have no right to pass a whistleblower law allowing federal employees who learn of lawbreaking to inform Congress about it, because such a law would infringe on the President's constitutional powers. In Mukasey's worldview, the President has unlimited power and Congress has none. ...

All day long, in response to Mukasey's insistence that patent illegalities were legal, that Congress was basically powerless, and that the administration has no obligation to disclose anything to Congress (and will not), Senators would respond with impotent comments such as: "Well, I'd like to note my disagreement and ask you to re-consider" or "I'm disappointed with your answer and was hoping you would say something different" or "If that's your position, we'll be discussing this again at another point." They were supplicants pleading for some consideration, almost out of a sense of mercy, and both they and Mukasey knew it.

A few months ago, when Mukasey was up for a vote in the Democratic Senate, there were those who quibbled on such minor things as his refusal to say clearly whether one of the Spanish Inquisition's favorite torture techniques was actually torture. They believed that the Democrats needed to stand firm and demand that Mukasey show he clearly believed in accountability and the long-established principles of the rule of law. But these impractical idealists were confronted with the pragmatic realities of the situation: if they failed to confirm Mukasey, we'd all be stuck with a time-serving former deputy of the disgraced Alberto Gonzales, who would do Dubya's bidding and nothing else.

The pragmatists won. The Senate chose to eschew empty, dramatic gestures in favor of its more dignified, established, mature, bipartisan approach. And look how much better off we all are for it.

At the very least, we know what they stand for.

2008-01-28T22:33:00.000-05:00

No comment on Dubya's speech. On the Democratic response, I thought it was fitting that Sebelius closed by saying "sleep well". No matter what she was saying, whether about the economy, health care, or the military, she said it like she was reading a bedtime story.

That's not a gender thing, by the way; Barbara Jordan could give a hell of a speech, and Fred Rogers was unsurpassed at the art of the bedtime story. Until now.

But this is an orator who could put you to sleep while the Cloverfield monster was chowing down on the building next door. While she was reading about routes out of town. How on earth did she get elected?

More: Barack Obama shows how to do it. He's still not my favorite among the Democratic candidates, but if I was grading them solely on oratorical skill, he's the best and there's no number two.

2008-01-27T16:39:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, there was a huge fuss about an arrest of a doctor in Australia on terrorist charges. It looked bad. The guy's movements were very suspicious, and police said he had been able to provide no coherent explanation at all. Except that he had, as quickly became apparent when his lawyer released the full transcript of his interrogation.

Charges against the doctor have been abandoned as baseless... but the lawyer may lose his license, due to a complaint filed by (among others) the police. As they explain:

Releasing the transcript was “unprofessional and inappropriate,” the federal police said in a statement, and resulted in “a great deal of misinformed and speculative reporting.”

The repeated false statements released by the police themselves, and the unjustified character assassination that followed are, evidently, less of a concern.

It's rare to see such a clear demonstration of the difference between legal "ethics" and real ones.

2008-01-27T16:21:00.000-05:00

Headline of the day:

Pakistan Rebuffs Secret U.S. Plea for C.I.A. Buildup

So, Musharraf is no longer telling the United States what it wants to hear. Perhaps because we've already tried to maneuver him out of power once --- a plan that failed when our designated successor, Benazir Bhutto, stood up through the roof of her armored car in the middle of an uncontrolled crowd, and someone in that crowd (it hardly matters who) took the easy shot. But this certainly won't help him last longer.

2008-01-24T22:13:00.000-05:00

So, French bank Société Générale is finding out what it feels like to find out that a trader in "plain vanilla" stock deriviatives just cost you five billion euros. And Libération, flaunting the 'tude of a bizarro-world left wing doppelganger of the New York Post, is all over this. Of course, there's the de rigeur stuff like a list of uses for the missing money (320 business jets! Two aircraft carriers: one new, one used!) But they also had fun with the bank's press conference, which revealed (among other things) that they were still "in the process of" trying to file a legal complaint against the guy responsible. In a story headlined "He almost blew up a French bank, and then went fishing?!", Libé went on:

The journalists insist: didn't they have to file suit quick, so he couldn't just leave? [Replied the bank reps], "Someone may have made a bit of an error there."

Gee, do ya think?

2008-01-24T22:08:00.000-05:00

Ever think that the neoconservative brain trust in Dubya's White House wasn't so much trying to achieve any particular result in the Middle East, as to just sow chaos? Well, here's Doug Feith:

Feith ... told me that the neoconservatives—at least those inside the administration—did not hope to create new borders, but did see a value in “instability,” especially since, in his view, the Middle East was already destabilized by the presence of Saddam Hussein. “There is something I once heard attributed to Goethe,” he said, “that ‘Disorder is worse than injustice.’ We have an interest in stability, of course, but we should not overemphasize the value of stability when there is an opportunity to make the world a better or safer place for us. For example, during the Nixon presidency, and the George H. W. Bush presidency, the emphasis was on stabilizing relations with the Soviet Union. During the Reagan administration, the goal was to put the Communists on the ash heap of history. Those Americans who argued for stability tried to preserve the Soviet Union. But it was Reagan who was right.”

So, um, who in America was trying to preserve the Soviet Union? But then again, as a Bush administration offical, Feith is just once again proudly affirming his place outside the reality based community...

2008-01-22T22:41:00.000-05:00

During the real estate boom, a lot of lenders effectively stopped requiring down payments. One consequence is that, if the value of the house drops, and the buyers want to leave, they can hand the bank the keys and walk away without losing anything. If the price drop exceeds what little principal they've built up, they literally have nothing to lose.

Apparently, there are bankers that feel that people who are doing this are somehow letting the banks down; one from Wachovia complains that some of them "had the capacity to pay, but basically just decided not to."

Well, one thing that gets said of troubled homeowners is that they made a deal, and if it went sour, then maybe they should have thought more about it going in. If that applies to poor zhlubbs who got pressured into a bad snap decision by pushy realtors, then it surely applies to the banks.

Then again, maybe this is just the new American ethos, in which forgiveness is only for big shots. One off-beat thing that's shaping my perspective on this a bit is seeing the reactions to a much-loved local ice cream shop that got into tax trouble, and (making no excuses) is asking for those with a will to extend a little help. Now, mind you, I don't see this personally as a charity thing. I make my charitable donations elsewhere, and I'm giving them a little cash because I've made a cold, hard-hearted, purely self-centered calculation that come summertime, I'll want their ice cream. But if you read the comments on their impromptu blog, it's astonishing how many people there are apparently offended by the idea that people might want to help a friend who's in trouble, even if some of it is their fault...

2008-01-20T10:16:00.000-05:00

Is it nice to have a really successful football team around Boston? There are drawbacks. For one thing, they've filled the area with the moral equivalent of Yankee fans. Which is why it's no shock that chisel-chinned fashion plate Tom Brady (who may yet find a way to get one of those pocket handkerchiefs into a football jersey, and let the league office fight it out with Gisele) is himself a Yankee fan of long standing, who, it is rumored, used to wear a Yankee cap in the Patriots locker room until someone told him to cut it out.

But we may have to put this down as a case of unrequited fan-love. Or at least partly unrequited. The Pats are playing the Chargers in the conference championship today, and on his new blog, Yankee pitching phenom Phil Hughes is pulling for the Chargers.

No reaction yet from any of the Yankee fan sites that really, really, don't like pitchers blogging when they're named "Curt Schilling". But then again, if Hughes gets traded to the Twins for Johan Santana --- not likely, at the moment, but still possible --- then the problem may solve itself.

2008-01-17T22:52:00.001-05:00

Colin Kahl, a Professor of "Security Studies" at Georgetown, explains why the Air Force is once again bombing the crap out of neighborhoods full of Iraqis who we'd like to make our friends:

Part of this is announcing our presence to the adversary.

That's odd. We've been there a while. I'd have thought, by now, they'd have noticed.

via Yglesias.

2008-01-17T22:51:00.001-05:00

I've lately been reading a bit about politics in France, a weird, topsy-turvy land where right-wing President Sarkozy is proposing new taxes to pay for commercial-free state TV, and inviting the heads of powerful labor unions to join him at the old Versailles hunting lodge that he's made his personal Camp David, while high officials of his own party complain they can't beg an invite. And where the left is maybe, just maybe a little too left-wing for my taste.

But there's one thing that Sarko's doing that strikes me as really questionable. Nothing to do with his personal style. I'm long past caring about that in politicians. (Though, by the by, it's a bit unfair for Ségolène Royal to complain that he's "an exhibitionist who lives like a billionaire". Unfair to billionaires, that is --- the problem with Sarko is that he lives like Donald Trump). Nor even the odd prattling on about the religious roots of civilization that has him frantically trying to explain that he's not trying to go back on separation of church and state.

No, what has me worried is that he's hired some American management consultants to evaluate his ministers, by establishing numeric targets for them to meet. For everything. Not just, say, the border guards, who have a quota of sans-papiers to turn away. But the culture minister, who's been tasked to get more people walking through free museums.

Well, there's an old story in computer circles about this sort of thing --- a story that never goes out of style, because each new generation of green, know-it-all managers keeps making the same damn mistake. They establish solid numeric targets for their programmers, in lines of code written, and in defects fixed. Thus rewarding the behavior that they want to encourage. What could possibly go wrong?

What goes wrong first is that programmers can maximize the first metric by quickly writing a lot of sloppy, buggy code. But, of course, that code is full of defects and barely works at all. Is this a problem? Not at all! They then get to waste time and earn money maximizing the second metric by fixing all the bugs that, with a little more care, they would never have introduced in the first place.

Government, of course, is a more complex business than the common run of programming. So, experience in the one field isn't necessarily a great guide to the other. But if a lot of French museums are suddenly doing shows of Tintin originals and the art of the soccer stadium, you'll know why.

2008-01-16T01:34:00.000-05:00

The shell game's easier when you can hear the pea rattling around. But a lot less fun.

Mike Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, is not running for President. He'll tell you that himself, as he did just a couple of days ago:

"No matter how many times you ask the question, I'm not a candidate," Mr. Bloomberg said this morning during a press conference at a school in Harlem, when asked if he is paying for national polling right now. "That's the answer. I can't go into nit picking. This is ridiculous."

So, why, you may be wondering, do people keep asking? It's because he's unusually serious about not running for President.

Now, personally, I'm not running for President, and it hasn't cost me a dime. But that's because I'm not as serious about not running for President as Bloomberg has been. He's run ads before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, to say a few things about illegal guns, and, no doubt, to reassure the voters that he is not running for President. He's spending millions of dollars on polls, no doubt to determine how lousy an idea it would be for him to run. And he just formally went through the rigamarole of placing all of his assets in a blind trust, so people can be sure that his decision not to run for President was untainted by any conflict of interest.

But to date, at least, the centerpiece of his campaign to convince people that he isn't running for President has been his appearance at the Unity08 confab --- a rather strange event which was organized by the eminences grises of the 1976 Presidential campaign (Jimmy Carter's guru, Gerald Rafshoon, and Gerry Ford's, Douglas Bailey). It featured a number of ex-Senators and the like, from both parties (and even more impressively, actor Sam Waterston, who plays a hard-ass prosecutor on TV) decrying the tone of partisan bickering which, they say, has paralysed Washington. But the only truly newsworthy thing that seems to have happened was an appearance by Bloomberg at which he, once again, denied that he's running for President:

"I'm not a candidate, number one. I am a former businessman and a mayor," he said in a panel discussion and news conference at the University of Oklahoma.

And he even got the host of the meeting, ex-Senator David Boren, to back him up:

"I don't think he has the ambition to run for president and I think he's like the rest of us, hoping against hope that the two parties rise to the occasion," Boren said.

And yet, some people just don't get the message. The latest on this front is that Rafshoon and Bailey have decamped from Unity08 to form a "Draft Bloomberg" committee, with a slick interactive website letting you add your name to a petition. Click on the "Why Mike Bloomberg" link, and the page opens up to reveal links to a number of puff pieces which, no doubt, prefigure the sort of campaign they'd want to run in case they got the opportunity: the featured story by Newsweek is a pure personality piece (in the spirit of the American Revolution, he liked the book Johnny Tremain!), which doesn't even talk about the problems of actually governing New York City, let alone the country as a whole. Which may be the beginnings of a new Rafshoon/Bailey strategy for transcending partisan bickering in politics, by endorsing politicians who strive to take no position at all on any substantive political issue.

Too bad they'll never get the chance, since Bloomberg is so serious about not running.

(As for Unity08, by some sad coincidence, their funds have suddenly dried up, to the point that they can no longer afford an interactive web site at all. The sole page on their web site, as of right now, blames the FEC, in the spirit of "transparency". They had this ballot access thing going that a number of their staffers must have really believed in. I wonder if any of them feel they got used?)

More: Well, one of them seems happy enough. In comments on another thread on the subject, erstwhile Unity08 Marketing Director Bob Ross popped in to deny these annoyingly persistent rumors that Unity08 has simply transformed itself into the "Draft Bloomberg" movement:

... the truth of the matter, if you are interested, is that the closure of Unity08 was not a process of tranfering, redirecting, re-allocating, re-structuring, re-constituting, or re-organizing into a pro-Bloomberg effort. No member information or money was moved from one organization to the other. They are completely separate organizations.

Which prompted the obvious question on what he's going to be doing next. His response, in a subsequent comment:

I’ve decided to retire to my home state to spend some time with family while also helping out some friends get a few different projects off the ground. As I am sure you might find if you read several political blogs, one of those projects happens to be the draftbloomberg.com movement.

Which is, once again, a completely separate organization which just happens, by some totally strange coincidence, to have the same leadership and staff.

The pea is under the shell on the left. Honest!

2008-01-16T00:59:00.000-05:00

Campaigning in 2000, Dubya complained that Clinton's peacekeeping missions in Kosovo had left the army just about worn out:

''If called on by the commander in chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, 'Not ready for duty, sir,' '' Mr. Bush said.

He himself has achieved better results:

“We are consumed with meeting the demands of the current fight and unable to provide ready forces as rapidly as necessary for other contingencies,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Nov. 15.

The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2006 that Army readiness rates had declined to the lowest levels since the end of the Vietnam War, with roughly half of all Army units, active and reserve, at the lowest readiness ratings for currently available units. Casey told the Senate committee that training and readiness levels for nondeployed units have “actually stayed about the same since last summer — and it’s not good.”

Unlike that liberal wimp Clinton, Dubya has worn out the whole damn army!

via Jim Henley.

2008-01-15T10:13:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, the story out of Washington was that the "surge" had finally started to yield the political gains that justified it in the first place, with a new law which allowed Sunni functionaries from the former regime back into the Shiite-dominated government. Well, whenever you hear a story like that, wait a few days, and then read Spencer Ackerman, who reports that the law actually kicks out as many ex-Baathists as it lets in:

...the Shiite/Kurdish government finally passes a de-Baathification law, only the law is phony. The Sunnis are outraged: one Sunni parliamentarian calls the law "a sword on the neck of the people."

Or maybe Le Monde, which reports on the one thing on which the Shiites and Sunnis have lined up together: keeping the Kurds from taking control of Kirkuk (which was supposed to be the subject of a long-delayed referendum), an issue on which the "Shiite/Kurdish" coalition may itself be breaking up.

Gotta be careful with those French, though. They're covering the American presidential campaign as if it was about the issues; Le Monde's two American election stories today are about the Clinton and Obama stimulus plans, and trying to find some real policy import, possibly protectionist, in the bloviation of McCain and Romney about bringing jobs back to Michigan. Whereas here in America, listening to our own media, I know that what it's really about is whether the candidates can find a way to talk nice about each other. I'm listening to a radio hour on this theme on my local public radio station right now...

2008-01-13T23:34:00.000-05:00

In a Times Op-Ed, John Farmer, erstwhile counsel to the 9/11 commission, reports on, among other things, a seriously messed up prosecution:

In United States v. Lakhani, the defendant, Hemant Lakhani, bragged to an F.B.I. informant of his ability to procure everything from shoulder-held missiles to submarines. There was only one problem: it became clear over a 22-month period that Mr. Lakhani couldn’t deliver. He was unable to find anyone to sell him the weapons.

So, in exasperation, the government stepped in. A government agent arranged to be the supplier for Mr. Lakhani. The government thus not only induced the defendant to commit the crime, but enabled him to commit it. No matter. Mr. Lakhani was convicted, and sentenced to 47 years in prison by a federal district court in New Jersey.

The people responsible get to carve another notch on their desks, or whatever, but it's clear from a larger point of view that Lakhani was no threat, and the deployment of a federal task force to pursue him was a complete waste of time.

From this case, and that of Jose Padilla, another guy who more famously got a long jail sentence for minor charges advanced after the original "dirty bomb" publicity failed to pan out, he observes that things are seriously wrong. And proposes a remedy:

It is time to stop pretending that the criminal justice system is a viable primary option for preventing terrorism. The Bush administration should propose and Congress should pass legislation allowing for preventive detention in future terrorism cases like that of Mr. Padilla. It is the best way to ensure both the integrity of our criminal law and the safety of our nation.

Well, that'll certainly deal with the problem --- the problem, that is, of the government's mistakes leaving them embarrassed.

It's just a shame that we have to destroy the integrity of our criminal justice system --- based on habeas corpus, and the presumption of innocence --- in order to save it.

2008-01-11T10:46:00.000-05:00

The mainstream press is known, on the blogs, for its obsession with trivialities. A lot of blogs, in turn, have obsessions of their own --- like the hopeless presidential bid of libertarian Ron Paul. Thus, if you were only reading the mainstream press, you would be completely unaware that Paul's campaign just became absolutely hopeless. Which, of course, it was already. But more so.

What's fueling the tempest in this particular teacup is sudden publicity for a lot of ugly, blatantly racist screeds that were published over Paul's signature in the '80s (without his involvement, he claims); the newsletters have long been out of view, though well known to libertarian "thought leaders" all the while. In the meantime, Jim Henley suggests, anent Paul's own plea for his supporters to please just start talking about something else, the following maxim:

When mired in a specifically racial controversy, avoid likening your enemies to “Orcs.”

But reading the same thing, I'm more taken by who Paul is likening to the orcs who libertarian paladins-in-their-own-minds should dedicate themselves to beating back:

...now is the time to stick together like the brothers and sisters we are, to stand side by side in this fight against the media toadies, warmongers, and Wall Street rip-off artists who stand against us, and who always remind me of Tolkein's Orcs.

One reason that the "Wall Street rip-off artists" have gotten more pernicious over the past few years is deregulation that was signed into law by that arch-Libertarian Bill Clinton, who, in particular, erased the distinction between deposit banks and financiers (put in place in the 1930s as a remedy for past abuse that was well-known back then). And the further deregulation of the Libertarian non-government that Paul wants to put in place of what we have could only empower the "orcs" even more.

Well, as a lefty myself, I'll say one thing for Libertarianism. Leftist opponents of a Libertarian state wouldn't have to worry much at all about heightening the contradictions...

2008-01-10T13:01:00.000-05:00

Wondering how Wall Street titans like Citigroup and Merill Lynch are dealing with the losses from defaults on all the bad mortgages they bought? Well, in part, they're selling themselves to foreign governments (through "sovereign wealth funds") --- in part because, as one article explains, they think they may be able to skirt reporting requirements that way:

Under one theory, sovereign-wealth funds should be regarded as government entities, not companies or investors --- and therefore the Bank Holding Company Act and other laws wouldn't apply in the same fashion.

Because right around now, they really don't want more regulatory attention adding to their troubles. The article quotes a lobbyist who has dealt with the regulatory aspects of these deals:

The goal is to get a [page] B6 story in the Wall Street Journal and have no one mention it.

Well, if that's the goal, it's not working out. That quote appeared itself, with the article I'm quoting, in the Wall Street Journal --- on page A1, above the fold.

Other articles on the investments, without paywalls, can be found elsewhere...

2008-01-07T23:34:00.000-05:00

Lefty blogs complain a lot about the mainstream media's focus on manufactured incidents and junior-high-school level gossip. A few right now are taking time off from that to observe that when John Edwards reacted to second-hand reports of Hillary Clinton getting emotional about something, he didn't seem very nice.

While you're pondering the deep and lasting significance of this singularly important event, here's something to bear in mind: the political wisdom of Leo Durocher. The Democratic leadership we have in Congress right now, like the Giants team that Leo famously mocked in 1946, is full of nice guys who can't win a thing. If electing something different turns out to be what it takes to get a different result, I can live with that.

2008-01-07T14:12:00.000-05:00

The bloggers at RedState need a lot of coding work done. But while liberal web sites can call on programmers to fix things up for free (or so they apparently believe), they will have to pay. So, if you follow that link, you'll see an emergency appeal for funds to pay for coding work. Work which they have already begun, before anyone gave them a dime.

In short, they've got pie-in-the-sky plans for their web site, and they don't have the money to pay for them, but they're doing it anyway. Does this go against their political philosophy? Not at all. Just look at the way their party has been running the government. It's the conservative thing to do.

2008-01-06T11:59:00.000-05:00

One of the more, dare I say, uplifting bits from the last season of Sex and the City came when Samantha, giving a speech while under chemo for breast cancer, whipped off her wig in the middle --- revealing her real, nearly-bald head, and prompting other cancer patients in the crowd to do the same. And to stop trying to hide what they are, and take some pride in it.

Not everyone involved with the show has gotten the message. The movie sequel, shot last fall, is going to be the year's least noticed digital special effects extravaganza, because the point of the effects in this case is to keep things off the screen --- most notably, all signs of aging from the faces and bodies of the main characters in closeups.

(Believe it or not, this comes via the movie's own official blog.)

2008-01-04T09:11:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty cynical myself, and mostly sympathetic to cynics generally, but every so often I run across someone who takes it too far. One Thomas Daulton, on an IOZ comment thread, quips:

[The Democrats would] love, and have tried, to form a personality cult around Bill Clinton, but it's been obvious since his Governor days that -- like other banana republic dictators -- Bill looked at public office more as a means of chasing tail than the Will to Power, and thus lacked staying power as a dictator.

Yeah, right. The focus of his presidency was chasing tail, and the best tail that he could get, as President of the frigging United States, was a college intern. I mean no offense to Monica Lewinsky here, who might well be a fine catch for the likes of me, but Bill Clinton --- he who routinely stayed up into the small hours debating issues with unattractive male subordinates, he whose memoir got panned because it was all policy and no dish --- if he'd really focused on chasing tail, he would have done better.

The irony here is deeper than, say, a Libertarian writing, in all apparent seriousness, that the true danger of government health care is that it might become as obnoxious and destructive to liberty as unregulated corporations have already been --- if perhaps not so obvious.

It's not just that Daulton's disappointment with cynical, substance-free politicians has itself become a cynical pose, which is obviously devoid of substance. If you read the whole comment, he clearly sees himself as a radical critic of the established political order. But in support of that position, he's taken one of the silliest talking points of the Washingtonian chattering classes (habitually projecting their own empty-headedness on everyone else), and just run with it, without subjecting the thing itself to the least critique.

Vacuous personality politics? He's soaking in it.

By the way, I was generally disappointed with Clinton, and didn't vote in the 1996 election because I didn't want to give him my support --- not that it mattered much in Massachusetts anyway. (Largely because of his civil rights record, but his failure to secure decent NAFTA side agreements was also a deep disappointment). I never doubted that he had serious, considered positions on issues, though --- I just didn't like them.

2008-01-03T09:53:00.001-05:00

Wondering what's behind McCain's late resurgence in New Hampshire? Can't figure out if it's new support from establishment figures, distaste for Romney, or what?

Well, I've been avoiding primary news as much as I could, but simply by being situated in broadcast range of New Hampshire, I am perforce aware of local factors of overriding importance which may have escaped the attention of the national media. I refer specifically to the Red Sox fan base, which is deeply affected by the endorsement of the Man with the Bloody Red Sock himself, pitcher Curt Schilling. You can't watch a local sports game lately without seeing Schilling make his (remarkably effective) pitch for McCain at least two or three times --- and since we once again seem to have a professional basketball team in town, there are suddenly quite a lot of those... to say nothing of the broadcasts of Sportscenter and the two local variations on that theme.

2008-01-03T09:26:00.001-05:00

Speaking of that primary news I've been avoiding: on the Democratic side, it's seeming more to me like Edwards is probably the best of a not entirely satisfactory lot, because he shows the most signs of actually understanding that the Republicans and business interests will howlingly oppose just about any attempt to roll back the lingering craziness of the Bush years, in any sphere. He's the only one who's making a point of saying that --- and given his background as a forceful litigator, it's conceivable that he actually means it. It's also nice that he's saying, at least in public, that pulling the troops out of Iraq means pulling them all out, not leaving tens of thousands in for some nebulous training mission.

Dodd certainly deserves props for being just about the only person in the Senate to actually lead opposition against at least one of Dubya's blatantly unconstitutional maneuvers --- very much against the will of his own party leadership. But if you have to choose between an emphasis on the economic disaster, and an emphasis on the civil rights disaster, consider this: people with food on their tables and roofs over their heads can agitate for more civil rights. People with civil rights but no food on the table may be trying too hard to get it the next time their civil rights get taken away.

I'm not decided myself, but Obama's echoing of right-wing talking points (even on social security, fercryinnoutloud!) has turned me off, and Hillary's talk about the war is downright scary, so it's down to those two, or to one, if I limit myself to media-annointed major candidates...

Update: Well, so much for Dodd, at least in the Presidency. I think he would have been perfectly fine in the general campaign --- as noted below, I think all the Democrats in this round are stronger than anyone running on the Republican side. But in this primary field, he didn't effectively compete...

And one last point: for this primary round, we can say to hell with "electability" even on strictly tactical grounds. Given the weakness of the Republican primary field, and all that the Republicans have to live down, any of the Democrats should be able to wipe the floor with any of the Republicans --- and if they can't, it's a problem with the party itself. So it actually makes sense, for once in our lives, to really think hard about a strange question that no one is accustomed to discuss at all when talking about the various presidential candidates: which of these people would actually do the best job at governing the country?

2007-12-31T10:58:00.000-05:00

Of all the encomiums I've seen for Benazir Bhutto over the last few days, I was most struck by a passage from this reminisce from the brother of a college friend:

Her family, for reasons never explained to me, had told her that someday she would be the leader of her home nation and in order to achieve that she would need the credibility in the eyes of the western world that would come from a premier western education--they decided that the Harvard/American connection would be more valuable than the connections she would get if she was educated in Europe.

She seemed to believe in this preordained destiny and did not fight it. She said it was her obligation. I thought the whole thing sounded crazy, how could her family just DECIDE to make her a national leader? I mean, a Harvard education is a wonderful thing, but not every Harvard graduate goes on to lead a nation. I used the word "preposterous" more than once to describe her life plan. Later, I learned just how wrong I could be.

She was so convinced that she would become Pakistan's leader, she said the only one way that could not happen, would be if her brother killed her first. One of her brothers was furious that she, a worthless girl, had been chosen by the family instead of him--a not girl. I read in the newspapers years later that one of her brothers had been killed and that her niece blamed Bennie for it. I always wondered if that was the brother who had threatened her so many years before.

De mortuis, said the Romans, nil nisi bonum. I'm not Roman.

With a brother like that, her family didn't exactly adhere to Western standards of good governance much --- they were formal feudal landholders saw themselves as dynasts, and Bhutto's rule was of a piece with that heritage. In the huge bribes she took from Western interests. In her tolerance and support for Muslim fanatics (including the Afghan Taliban), from which her assassination may have been blowback. And, at the end, in her political will and testament, which nominated as successor not some trusted, experienced lieutenant (of which she apparently didn't have any), but the obvious dynastic successor --- her callow, nineteen-year-old son.

The family didn't send her to Harvard and Oxford to become Western. She left as she came --- as one of their own. They sent her for the reasons she said they sent her --- to make contacts, and to learn to play the part of the friendly, Westernized leader for as long as there were Westerners in the room. It's a way that third-world elites have of dealing with our own --- Europeans and particularly Americans who seem to always think that they're too smart to be fooled by anyone with a brown skin and a third-world pedigree. Witness, say, Ahmed Chalabi, on the run from a conviction for massive bank fraud in Jordan, who had half the White House primed to make him our savior in Iraq, while all the while he was playing footsie with Iranian intelligence --- among numerous other sad examples strewn across the globe.

That's what Bhutto went to learn at Harvard and Oxford. And the proof of her determination and talent is the hagiography that we've been drowning in over the past few days. She did spectacularly well.

More: In the Guardian, William Dalrymple memorializes the Benazir that hung out with the rich and powerful in London, and the one that ruled Pakistan --- which he describes as two very different people. Via Patrick Nielsen Hayden

(Most links from Matthew Yglesias, who's been all over this).

2007-12-31T10:21:00.001-05:00

Ad Broadcast peeve of the week: on the broadcast network simulcast of the Pats/Giants game Saturday evening, just before kickoff, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and some minor on-air "talent" for the NFL's private cable channel ran through a painfully scripted interview in which Goodell's speechwriter made a point of saying that "this [was] not the moment" to argue the NFL's case in its ongoing dispute with major cable companies.

That moment apparently arrived about five minutes later, with the first of at least three airings of a commercial in which a diner full of people spent 60 seconds bitching about how they couldn't get "NFL network" on their cable systems.

For those unaware of the dispute: "NFL network" carries eight games a year, which amount to about 24 hours a year of general-interest programming. The other 364 days a year, it reruns games that were already broadcast (and recorded by fans with an interest), and carries a bunch of other stuff of interest to only hard-core fans. For some incredibly strange reason, the cable companies haven't seen fit to pay more for this than they do for CNN --- and the NFL owners, for their part, are howling that the networks are betraying their viewers by trying to negotiate on price, and refusing to take part in such a base betrayal of trust. That's what they say --- and why wouldn't you believe them?

2007-12-25T12:57:00.001-05:00

I haven't posted in a while, but hey. The Democratic congressional leadership is still following Dubya's diktats. The mainstream press are still propagandists (lately saying that the "Venezuelan dictator" has lost a referendum, lest the facts get in the way of a good line). And, oh yeah, waterboarding is still torture.

Time to blog something that's genuinely news. Paris Hilton is here to provide:

PARIS Hilton tried to adopt two Smurfs.
The hotel heiress was so enamoured with the two dwarf actors - who were dressed as the blue cartoon characters to promote Haribo's new Smurf sweets at a Christmas market in, Berlin, Germany - she asked if she could take them home with her.
A source said: "When Paris saw the guys on the sweet stall she squealed. We heard her saying, 'Oh my, real life Smurfs. I always wanted one when I was a kid', before turning to her pal and asking, 'Can I take them home?'
"Then she added 'I didn't realise this is where they came from.'"

The guys in the Smurf suits were reportedly unamused. And yet. There is a problem here, but it's not what you think.

The real problem here is that Paris has not made it sufficiently clear that her actions are intended as an ironic commentary on the industrial commodification of child-rearing and interpersonal relationships in the postmodern, atomized social milieu of contemporary society.

Don't believe me?

Then I invite you to visit the Guggenheim museum in Manhattan, whose Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda is currently hosting a one-man retrospective of the work of Richard Prince. Right at the base of the signature spiral ramp are the pieces that launched his career --- four blown-up pictures from furniture ads, with the store names and prices cropped out. These pieces caused a sensation, as the recordaguide explains (speaking Verrry Slooowly to make sure you don't miss an Important Point), because they made it clear that furniture ads don't depict reality. Rather, what shows up in furniture ads is a simulated, fabricated, phony version of reality, dressed up to sell furniture. This startling fact had apparently escaped all notice from anyone in the art world until Prince came along to point it out. So to you, Prince's version of the ad might look like a furniture ad. But connoisseurs appreciate that even though it looks exactly same, it in fact has much greater intellectual depth.

And so it goes, all the way up the ramp. The blown-up pics of biker chicks posing topless on their boyfriends' hogs? No one on the Upper East Side would pay fifteen cents for the originals, clipped out of the back of déclassé rags with titles like "Easyriders". But blown up to life size, with the artist's imprimatur, they become an ironic commentary on class and gender relationships in postmodern society, and high society suddenly finds it well worth paying tens of thousands of dollars to bring this elevated discourse into their homes. (Never suggest for a minute that the buyers are merely paying to get an excuse to gawk at their social inferiors. For shame! It gives the game away!)

And no less thought went into Paris's performance. I really mean that. But to really establish herself as Prince's intellectual peer, she'd have to have to start talking about the theoretical framework that provides the intellectual basis for these... performance pieces. And what would it take to make that presentation really effective? Less, perhaps, than you might think. It doesn't necessarily have to even make sense. So long as it's confusing enough that it isn't obviously nonsense, that may be good enough. Heck, even in academia, that's built thriving careers for people --- Noam Chomsky may complain that the pomo litcrit crowd has never been able to explain their mysteriously nameless "theory" to him in the few hours it takes for such lesser intellectuals as mathematicians and quantum physicists to explain the basic gist of theirs, but hey, it still pays the rent.

(And if it is obviously nonsense? Well, Duchamp made that work --- but I've gotta say, it's a lot more effort).

In summary, the reason that an "appropriationist" like Prince gets taken more seriously than Paris Hilton, even though what he's doing is a whole lot sillier, is that he's got a line of pretentious babble that purports to explain what he's doing, and he knows how to look good saying it. Is it too much to suggest that Paris herself could manage the same, if she put her mind to it?

2007-12-25T11:16:00.000-05:00

Ad peeve of the week: The NFL Network promo that talks up the Patriots' undefeated 15-0 record when hyping the Pats-Giants game next weekend.

So, what's wrong with that? They were airing it during the Patriots-Dolphins game on CBS. The Pats hadn't won the 15th game yet. The league itself, through its official media arm, was taking it for granted that the Dolphins were going to lose.

I know the Dolphins are bad this year. I know they're atrocious this year. I know that Wayne Huizenga was whining about selling the team outright, so some other billionaire would be forced to endure the shame of owning it. But hasn't anyone on the media side of the operation heard of a "trap game"?

2007-11-22T12:02:00.000-05:00

In one of the least-read issues of the year, the New York Times today headlines this story:

Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior American military officials.

The Bush administration is expected to immediately issue trade sanctions and threats of military force. Exactly as they have done with their own far more tenuous hints and allegations that Iranians are involved in stirring up trouble, for some reason, against a government stocked with long-time friends of theirs that clearly wants to be an ally.

Not.

2007-11-08T12:39:00.000-05:00

So, now the story is that at Dubya's personal urging, the elections in Pakistan will be held, delayed by only a month in order to ~~rig 'em more thoroughly~~ make doubly sure of arrangements.

Bush also said, explaining the statement:

You can't be the president and the head of the military at the same time.

Golly, gee. Does that mean that he'll stop incessantly calling himself "commander in chief" when discussing matters of civil and criminal law?

Update: Rallies are banned, opposition politicians have been arrested, and nominal opposition leader Benazir Bhutto (already reported to have been in negotiations with Musharraf before he chucked the constitution) is giving stage-managed speeches from house arrest behind lines of Musharraf's troops. Meanwhile the slightly more credible leader of a different opposition party, Nawaz Sharif, cools his heels in Dubai. So, it seems like Dubya will get his election --- and unlike that awkward business with the Palestinians, with near certainty that ~~those allowed to vote~~ the voters will make the right choice...

2007-11-06T12:29:00.000-05:00

So, Musharraf in Pakistan declared that he needed a state of emergency to protect the country from terrorists --- and the first people arrested were his own political opponents. And the Bush administration is protesting the move and urging a return to democracy every bit as loudly and sanctimoniously as it urged giving diplomacy and inspections a chance before the Iraq invasion.

Musharraf said in his own speech that he wouldn't pay attention to outside whining, which may suit Dubya's crew fine --- if you want to know what they really think, you have to follow the money and the guns, which are both still flowing unabated.

Musharraf also cited, in his speech, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the civil war --- never mind that Lincoln never arrested judges poised to rule against him, as Musharraf has done, nor cancelled scheduled elections, which are now, in Pakistan, very much in doubt.

But then again, times may be changing. The Senate Judiciary committee just voted in an Attorney General candidate who stated, in his testimony, that the President has the right to violate whatever laws he sees fit, at essentially his own discretion. (There was a slight chance that a majority of committee members would gag on the even more laughable claim that forcing water into prisoners' lungs until loss of consciousness is somehow not torture --- but they have evidently managed to swallow it). So, given that more modern Republican philosophy, and, say, Rudy Giuliani's idea of freedom:

... freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
[ Interruption by someone in the audience. ]
You have free speech so I can be heard.

we Americans may yet have the opportunity to debate Musharraf's interpretation of Lincoln closer to home. In whispers, in private...

2007-10-30T10:22:00.000-04:00

Useless Democrat watch:

Faced with requests from Dubya's administration which were plainly illegal, large telecom companies followed orders, letting themselves be consoled with transparently bogus legal rationales from his flunkies. Now Jay Rockefeller, Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, proposes to give them immunity because, as he says:

... private companies who received legal assurances from the highest levels of government should not be dragged through the courts for their help with national security.

Heavens! If they were, then future criminal administrations might not be able to make their own crimes legal by fiat... and what, then would be the future of the Republic?

To be fair to Rockefeller, he goes on:

The onus is on the administration, not the companies, to ensure that the request is on strong legal footing, and if it is not, it is the administration that should be held accountable.

For some reason, press reports of the statement omit the calls for immediate impeachment and prosecution which would be needed to make this even minimally credible, but I'll stop calling Rockefeller a spineless toady to Republican power just as soon as they come along...

2007-10-30T10:10:00.000-04:00

Every Sunday this year, regular as clockwork, the Patriots have demolished another opponent, leaving fans of their hapless victims seized by a vague, nameless horror so mystical and well-nigh ineffable that they almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. One ESPN columnist has opined that in response to the trumped up "sign-stealing" scandal from earlier this year, head coach Bill Belichick is attempting to "lay waste to the NFL" (while another posits next weekend's tilt against the Colts, the other undefeated team in the league, as a battle of good vs. evil).

Well, if the idea is to show that Belichick doesn't need film from the other team's sidelines to win a game, just running up the score won't help. Perhaps, if they get past the Colts, he could just let the players on the field against some second-rate opponent play the game as they saw fit, while he himself was on the sidelines, visibly engaged in a seven-game simultaneous chess match with the rest of his coaching staff. If they won without any assistance from the coaches, electronic or otherwise, it probably still wouldn't silence the critics, but it would be interesting to watch. The chess, I mean... because the second halves of these football games have just been impossibly dull.