Well, kids, today is my last day as an Atlantic blogger and this is my last Atlantic post. The blog should re-launch on Monday, August 11 at:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org
That means no blogging for me for a week. I think I haven’t gone 24 hours without a blog post since 2004, and I haven’t gone blogless for a week since I started doing this over six years ago. I’m not sure if the vacation will be good for me, or if I’ll just drive everyone I know crazy pointing out that someone is wrong on the internet.
But I’m excited, both about the vacation and about the new job at the Center for American Progress. But it’s been a real thrill to spend some time as an “Atlantic Voice” and get to know Andrew and Ambinder, to work with Ross and Reihan and Megan, and, of course, to do The Table with its unsung heros Jenny and Terrence. I think Ta-Nehisi will be a great addition to the site, and I hope I’ll be a good addition to the CAP team. And with that -- goodbye, see you in a bit over a week.
The company is scrambling to retool for small cars, and I'm sure we'll hear a loud chorus of voices saying that GM did this to themselves by becoming so dependent on light trucks. Well, they did, but I'm not sure it's fair to blame management. GM's historical pension and healthcare obligations, and the vast difficulties they have in permanently laying off workers, mean that the company had to maximize cash flow as best they could.
But look: This is all management. GM could have struck a different bargain with its workforce that entailed higher salaries and lower long-term pension obligations. Its management thought it would be wiser to strike a different bargain, and the results have wound up being non-pretty. Running a large enterprise is difficult which, I think, is why the executives make the big bucks. But when decisions don't pan out, you take the blame. Meanwhile, car company management could have strongly backed the Clinton administration's effort to get health care under control back in 1993.
Barack Obama paraphrases Ronald Reagan's famous question: "Are you better off than you were four or eight years ago?"
Now personally, I'd say I'm much better off than I was as an awkward nineteen year-old college sophomore. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I'd give George W. Bush a ton of credit for that. Which is what's a bit odd about this question -- I'm not sure how tightly linked people's overall well-being really is to average economic trends. And at the same time the biggest victims of Bush's policies are the ones who are dead and thus don't have the chance to complain about it. A lot of people who were working eight years ago are retired today. And a lot of people who are working today were kids eight years ago. Many others have children today who they didn't have eight years ago. Or maybe eight years ago they were happily married and now they're divorced.
But even sticking to the strictly economic, we know that any given individual's wages tend to go up over the course of his/her career as he/she gains experience, skills, and seniority. Thus even during a period in which average wages stagnate, most people will actually be better off than there were a few years in the past.
But in their new role as bloggers, the paper’s editors seem to have all the intelligence and reason of the average Daily Kos diarist sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of dungeons and dragons.
Now here's the thing. Say what you will about RPG-loving nerds, but surely we recognize that these widely-loathed creatures are the very same widely-loathed nerds you could find in the BC Calculus class, taking AP Physics, or wasting time being taught Turbo Pascal. That's how we did things where I come from (admittedly, we played considerably more Diplomacy than AD&D but the principle is the same) at least, but I'm pretty sure that's the widespread stereotype. You can't, in other words, mock the nerds in the basement as being too dumb, it's just not right.
Meanwhile, yes, I assume that the NYT editorial board is not made up of folks who were the cool kids in high school. Was Goldfarb? It doesn't sound likely, but who knows. To speculate irresponsibly a bit, a lot of McCain's fans seem to me to be nerds who, instead of growing up and embracing their inner dungeon master, have instead decided that hanging out with the jock will make people think they're cool too.
With the fundamentals so favorable to Barack Obama, why can't he crack open a bigger lead against John McCain? What's wrong with him? Does he need to change tactics? Or is it, as Andrew Gelman explains, that what the fundamentals predict is a modest victory with Obama getting about 53 percent of the vote. Right now, that's exactly what he's in line for and I expect it's what he'll get.
Note that close-ish elections are probably how the world should be. A lot of people are conservative Republicans. Barack Obama is not a conservative Republican. There's really no reason for those people to vote for Obama, no more how badly the economy may be doing. I think the only scenario in which Obama could really win in a landslide would be one in which Bob Barr starts eating away at McCain's base vote.
I note, for the record, that Kagan's current kick about the need to revive great power conflict is orders of magnitude more wrongheaded and dangerous than the post-9/11 "let's invade Iraq" fad was. My friend DM likes to say that the one good thing about Iraq is that it distracted the neocons from their even crazier war with China schemes, but now those schemes are making a bit of a comeback.
It really is too bad that in this country an accident of birth can get you preferential treatment and cushy jobs, when we should be building the kind of color-blind meritocracy that would exist if we eliminated racial considerations from college admissions.
Eric Umansky at Pro Publica has assembled some cool graphics on the fiscal cost of the Iraq war. As you can see below, the inflation adjusted dollar cost has been enormous:
However, I don't think you can understand the politics of the war without understanding that in relation to the size of the American economy, Iraq has been small potatoes by historical standards:
A ton of money has been spent on the war, but compared to other wars the impact of this one on the typical American who's not actually serving has been relatively small. Meanwhile, though, note the mismatch between spending on Iraq and Afghanistan. At the moment, a debate is going on about whether sending more troops to Afghanistan today would help matters and I'm not 100 percent sure what I think of that. I am, however, pretty certain that if the Bush administration had followed up the brief deposing of the Taliban with a massive commitment to rebuilding the country equal to, say, half of what they spent on Iraq, that that would have made a difference.
America promised a robust effort to make sure that the war improved the lives of ordinary Afghans. And while we've certainly done some work along those lines, the comparative budgets of Iraq and Afghanistan show where our national priorities were, and they weren't on living up to the commitments Bush made. It
So there are all these liberals in the country. Probably if you took a smart liberal who performs well on television and made her the host of a TV show, those liberals would watch that show. Just a theory.
Enough people in the business have gotten in touch with me in a hurry to dispute the idea that Slate is a center-right publication that I'm starting to have some doubts. And I'll admit that while I look at Slate all the time, I'm not a particularly thorough reader of it and the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in my mind. I suppose I could take some time to do a thorough content analysis and see whether material that criticizes liberals or liberal positions outnumbers material that criticizes conservatives or conservative positions but that sounds boring and tedious. So I dunno, was I wrong about that?
Another thought on the general subject, is that I've noticed that a lot of people in the field of journalism have a tendency to judge the political proclivities of a publication by the subjective mental states of the staff. The correct way, however, is to look at what's on the pages. Having three socialists doing page layout, two moderate conservative writing features on political relevant topics, and one moderately liberal film critic does not a left-of-center publication make. Similarly, if in order to be "interesting" and "provocative" your publication contains some articles in which heterodox liberals challenge liberal conventional wisdom and other articles in which conservatives challenge liberal conventional wisdom, then your publication is mostly publishing conservative content.
The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.
Kevin Drum says "I'm not absolutely certain who my choice for scariest group in the world is, but if push came to shove it probably wouldn't be al-Qaeda. It would be the ISI, Pakistan's main intelligence service." Kevin and I were actually both part of a conversation at Netroots Nation where a third party argued that people feel Pakistan is terrifying because few people in the United States know anything about Pakistan or understand it. I countered that the very low level of knowledge about Pakistan in the United States is what makes it so scary on the merits. We're a very rich and powerful country and our wealth and might gives us a lot of ability to shape events in a favorable way. But that only works if we actually know what's going on -- in the absence of meaningful information, our power is useless.
The other smart thing, related, that somebody said to me recently about Pakistan is that Americans need to realize that all the stuff we care about is a secondary consideration over there. We think about Pakistan and its neighborhood primarily through the lens of al-Qaeda with other organizations defined by their relationship to al-Qaeda. The Taliban helps al-Qaeda and that's bad. Hamid Karzai fights the Taliban (which helps al-Qaeda) and that's good. When ISI helped the Taliban, that was bad. When Pakistan "flipped" and helped us establish Karzai, that was good. But when they fight Karzai (who fights the Taliban who help al-Qaeda) that's bad. This is how we order events and think about things.
But in Pakistan, the first, second, and third priority is India. Al-Qaeda, the United States, the Taliban, Karzai, warlords, the Northern Alliance, "militants," and so forth are only important insofar as they relate to India. To write about Pakistani intelligence "actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region" is to impose an America-centric frame on things. It makes it out as if Pakistani intelligence is waking up and thinking about American efforts to combat militants in the region, and then deciding to actively undermine them. More likely, they wake up and think about ways to undermine Indian efforts to expand influence in the region. If that means undermining American efforts, then our efforts are undermined.
I'm pretty sure the behavior Wal-Mart is engaged in here, pressuring employees to vote for John McCain, is illegal. But the real scandal is what's unquestionably illegal. There's an awful lot companies can do perfectly legally to block union organizing drives. But some of the most effective tactics are illegal. That doesn't, however, mean that following the law is smart business strategy:
On June 30 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Wal-Mart illegally fired an employee in Kingman, Ariz., who supported the UFCW and illegally threatened to freeze merit-pay increases if employees voted for union representation. The decision came eight years after the organizing campaign failed, and four years after the case was originally heard.
Under these circumstances, union organizers have no effective legal recourse to violations of labor law and employers have no incentive to actually follow the law. And since employees know the laws won't be enforced if broken, employers only relatively rarely need to actually break the law in order to get the correct intimidating threat. Like the mafia, a company like Wal-Mart only needs to be seen to break a few kneecaps and get away with it for there to be an adequate intimidation effect to de facto deny a vast workforce its rights.
Photo by Flickr user wetwebwork used under a Creative Commons license
Have you ever been reading Slate and found yourself thinking, "This is great, but if only if were more conservative..."? Then LibertyWire is for you! The new online publication, being launched in mid-August, is billing itself as "a conservative version of Slate." [...] A job listing I found for the new endeavor claims it will be "general interest," along the lines of "Slate, Esquire, Good, City Journal, The Atlantic or The New Yorker" (seriously, City Journal!?) but with an "editorial slant [that] is big tent right-of-center -- as open-minded about what we publish as The New Republic, The New Yorker or The New York Times Magazine, but on the center-right rather than the center-left."
This is a bit bizarre. Slate and The Atlantic are already center-right publications (I know my soon-to-be-former colleagues at The Atlantic don't necessarily see it that way, but it is). Most of The New Republic is mostly left-of-center on economic issues, but always takes time to run things like Greg Mankiw's case for abolishing Social Security (PDF) and rarely if ever countering its conservative views on foreign policy, Roe v. Wade, various Ben Wittes apologias for the Bush administration's abolition of due process, etc.
But the view is that in this landscape what the world needs is yet another dogmatically conservative magazine.
Ezra's damn right about this. Go to pretty much any populated part of the United States, buy some land, and try to build something on it and you'll find that there are a lot of land-use restrictions in place. Some of these rules are good, some of them are bad (on balance I'd say we're over-regulated in this regard) but they're really all-pervasive. Then along comes the LA City Council to say you can't open a new fast food restaurant in South LA and libertarians and Will Saletan are freaking out. It's about freedom, damnit.
Well, it is on some level, but this is hardly unique. Is Saletan for abolishing liquor license regulations? Maybe he is. I don't think that's a crazy position but that would be a radical change in the way we do business. Banning fast food outlets, by contrast, is very much in line with the status quo. And though it might shock Saletan to hear about it, there are lots of upscale towns and neighborhoods all across the country that do the same thing.
Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia Saletan lives in Chevy Chase Maryland. According to the zoning regulations I downloaded from the Chevy Chase town website, it is illegal in Saletan's town to build a house on a lot of fewer than 6,000 square feet. It is also illegal to build a house that covers more than 35 percent of a lot. [UPDATE: I originally posted some erroneous math here, which you can read about in comments but I've now deleted]. This makes housing more expensive than it would be if you were allowed to use the land more intensive, or if you were allowed to slice lots up into smaller homes.
I'm pretty skeptical that these proposed South LA regulations will do any good. But it's not unique or unusual for land use regulations to exist. And working class people around the country suffer dramatically larger concrete harms from the sort of commonplace suburbanist regulations that Saletan's been living with, without apparent complaint, in Chevy Chase. Those kind of regulations are bad for the environment, bad for public health, and serve to use the power of the state to redistribute upwards. So if you're going to rail against land use regulations, maybe pick the ones that really hurt people.
WSJ: "But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them." Obama's also taller than average, which is well-known to be a disadvantage in presidential politics.
In all seriousness, if the predominant aspect of superficial physical appearance that voters have in their head is anything other than race, I think Obama should consider himself lucky. America can handle a skinny president.
As sometimes happens when I read Marc Ambinder's blog, today I'm puzzled by the mentality of the campaign reporter:
While we've been focusing on the race card, the Republican echo chamber has been sounding full tilt about Barack Obama's Jimmy Carter-esque turn as advice columnist to Americans about energy. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity spent part of their broadcast mocking Obama for urging Americans to inflate their tires to help conserve gasoline.
Obama had a point, and the auto industry recommends the same thing as do governors Schwarzenegger and Crist, but nevermind; the ridicule fix is in. An effective GOP shot.
Here's my understanding of the sequence of events. Gas prices are on the rise. Consumers are feeling pain, harm is being done to the economy. Oil companies begin posting record profits. John McCain and the GOP propose a series of giveaways to oil companies that economists doubt will do anything to reduce gasoline prices in the short run. These measures will, however, starve the government of revenue for infrastructure, harm the environment, and devastate coastal economies. Barack Obama counters with a tip that will do no harm to the economy or the public purse but will allow people to save money in the short, medium, and long runs. Obama's proposal is endorsed by the auto industry as sound (similarly, fully inflated bike tires make you go faster), and has been embraced by the most successful politicians in the Republican Party today. But Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity mock it along with the rest of the "Republican echo chamber."
The upshot is deemed to be . . . success for the echo chamber, "an effective GOP shot." But why? Maybe the attack will be reported in a way that's helpful to Republicans. But why should it be reported that way? Why should slamming Obama for offering sound, bipartisan, industry-endorsed advice by an effective attack?
Photo by Flickr user Eric Castro used under a Creative Commons license
Despite yesterday's news that the economy is back to growing (albeit slowly) it seems job losses are still mounting. With inflation also on the rise, my understanding is that basically we're screwed.
I think the McCain campaign's "Celebrity" ad and the whole line about Barack Obama being too arrogant or something are pretty ridiculous, but it's a bit puzzling to me to see liberals expressing the view that these are some kind of crypto-racist lines of attack. Given that Obama's black, and America's history, I think it's always going to be possible to read some kind of racial subtext into attacks on him. But both of these are lines of argument you could easily imagine being deployed against a white candidate and, indeed, they're fundamentally similar to arguments Republicans regularly make against Democrats.
Beyond that, trying to sniff out racial subtexts in these kind of things strikes me as overwhelmingly likely to prove problematic. People really don't like to be called racists. Obama really has had a brief tenure on the national stage and most people really aren't especially familiar with his legislative record or his agenda. If people hear about Obama's record their doubts may be allayed. If they're told that their doubts are really just racism, they get defensive. Personally, I think Obama's record on getting police to videotape interrogations speaks extremely well of him. For one thing, he was right on the merits of the issue. But beyond that, this is the kind of thankless cause that politicians normally avoid. Even those who might be willing to back a measure of this sort are rarely going to decide that it's worth investing actual time and energy in it. And Obama showed great skill in, over time, growing his coalition and defusing the initial opposition of law enforcement groups -- getting them to see that at the end of the day serious law enforcement professionals have nothing to fear from high professional standards and meaningful efforts to see that justice is done. But how many people know about this stuff?
For reasons that remain a bit murky, the Bush administration, which has a terrible record on everything, seems to have a great record on homelessness. There was a HUD report out earlier this week indicating that some reforms in approach that the administration -- more specifically, a guy Philip Mangano -- has implemented are being stunningly successful and we've seen a 30 percent drop in homelessness between 2005 and 2007. Dana Goldstein has an informative brief interview with the New America Foundation's Douglas McGray about Mangano's philosophy and you can read this McGray article on Mangano from back in 2004. Hopefully the next administration of either party will continue to build on this foundation.
Chris Sheridan notes that LeBron James opened Team USA's exhibition game against Turkey with a FIBA move, swatting a ball that had hit the rim and was likely to bound into the hoop away from the basket. That's goaltending in America, but legitimate defense under FIBA rules.
That seems like an important step to me. Over the past few years, I've consistently thought that the fact that the rules have been an underplayed problem for American teams in international competitions -- it's hard when our guys are playing under unfamiliar rules that their opponents are familiar with. But it seems that this year the players and the coaching staff are putting more emphasis on getting people to think about how the FIBA ruleset should effect their behavior.
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Heads in the Sand
