Specter Gets a Primary Challenge!

This is good news (via Yglesias) - Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) .... a real Democrat .... is planning on challenging Arlen in the primary.

Young Faces

The American Prospect has a piece on the 2 youngest GOP/Dem members of congress.

Justice Sotomayor's Background

TNR has an all-star cast of legal scholars debating Obama's SCOTUS pick - and the relevance of her "background."

Bush-Obama v. Cheney

David Brooks makes a salient point today in his column: that the whole Obama/Cheney dust up perpetuates the idea that Obama's administration is a clean break from the Bush years, when really the late-Bush policies are very similar to the policies Obama promotes. So, when Cheney attacks Obama, he's really just reliving the battles he had with Bush when his hard-line tactics started to lose out.

This is backed up by Jack Goldsmith's TNR piece on how Obama is really just continuing Bush's later policies - except that he knows how to package them better - and treats the Americans as adults when he explains the options.

Value of a Liberal Arts Degree

With all the talk about competing in the global market, I'm glad someone is sticking up for those "do-nothing" degrees:

I asked Klapmeier what gave him the idea, back in the mid-1980s, that he could take on an industry as conservative and entrenched as general aviation. His answer:

"I think it was my college education. I went to Ripon College, which was a liberal arts school. And that kind of school teaches you how to think for yourself. My professors didn't tell you you were wrong. They convinced you you were wrong. And if they couldn't, you might end up changing their minds on something. Figuring out for yourself what right and wrong is builds a huge bit of confidence. The kind that makes you think maybe we can take on an industry."

Fall of the Preakness

(via VH1) This is the first year the Preakness banned BYOB in the infield, and this Slate article captures the nostalgia for the Preakness' wild days of yore.

After last year's Preakness resulted in multiple medical emergencies—one guy reportedly made it all the way across the porta-potties only to hit the ground face first—Preakness organizers decided it was time for a change. (Rampant nudity and occasional violence may have also played a role.) They banned outside booze, organized activities like a women's volleyball tournament and bikini contest, and invited musical acts Buckcherry and ZZ Top. It says something about the Preakness that these were the activities introduced to keep things under control.

Obama Interviews

First, John Meacham interviews Obama for Newsweek's cover

Next, the NYT economic reporter interviewed Obama for the magazine a few weeks back.

Soccer Dad In-Chief

Obama cheering at Sasha's soccer game (via Halperin)

The Case for A Pol on SCOTUS

(via Yglesias) TNR has a short essay on why - contrary to Obama's purported "short list" - it'd be good to put a politician on the court.

Bob Gates: "No, I Don't Enjoy My Job"

60 Minutes ran a great profile on Defense Secty Bob Gates. I was really impressed with his humility, sincerity, and openness. And the fact that he openly admits that most of his job really sucks - and I believe him when he says he only continues out of love for his country.

UPDATE: More good stuff on Gates from the WaPo (via Tom Ricks)

Numbers Don't Lie

From the WaPo ... a foreign policy debate the other night between the Cheney side and the non-nutty side:

A pre-debate poll of 430 audience members showed that 34 percent favored the Cheney-Senor side, 33 percent were with Burns-Pollack and 33 percent were undecided.

After the one-hour, 45-minute debate, Cheney's position was favored by 35 percent, while the Burns team rocketed to a whopping 59 percent vote and undecideds dropped to 6 percent.

Toons

An Indictment of Journalism

The Washington Posts' Walter Pincus pens a provoking counter-point piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on the decline of journalism ... and a lot of other good insights from his 50+ year career along the way.

So True

"I Don't Beleive I've Ever Met a Homosexual"

In all the talk of Obama's "empathetic" SCOTUS nominee, and the probability that it will be a woman - some have suggested why not nominate a gay person? Putting aside any identity politics, this post from Hilzoy has kept me thinking and really gives a concrete example of why "empathy" is a good judicial characteristic. Context: Lewis Powell was the swing vote in Bowers v. Hardwick, a famous case upholding the Georgia anti-sodomy statute and finding no "fundamental right" to consensual gay sex. (Bowers was the precursor to Lawrence v. TX).

Here's some evidence from Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine, pp. 218-219 (note that Justice Powell was the swing vote in this case, and came down in favor of upholding Georgia's sodomy statute):

"One Saturday in the spring of 1986, Justice Lewis Powell struck up a conversation with one of his law clerks, Cabell Chinnis Jr., about Bowers v. Hardwick. As Chinnis recounted the exchange to Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price, authors of a history of gay rights at the Supreme Court, Powell asked about the prevalence of homosexuality, which one friend-of-the-court brief estimated at 10%. Chinnis said that sounded right to him. "I don't believe I've ever met a homosexual", Powell replied. Chinnis said that seemed unlikely. Later the same day, Powell came back to Chinnis and asked, "Why don't homosexuals have sex with women?" "Justice Powell," he replied, "a gay man cannot have an erection to perform intercourse with a woman." The conversation was especially bizarre not just because of its explicit nature but because Chinnis himself was gay (as were several of Powell's previous law clerks.)"

You have to feel for the poor clerk: there he is, a closeted gay man, being quizzed by his boss about why homosexuals don't have sex with women. (Apparently, Justice Powell wasn't thinking of lesbians at all.) I think that a good working definition of empathy would be: that quality that allows a straight man or woman to know the answer to that question without having to ask his or her law clerks. And I would think that the fact that Justice Powell had to ask that question might explain why he believed, falsely, that he had never met a homosexual: if you were gay, would you tell him?

Happiness is Love

David Brooks' column today references this Atlantic piece on a study that followed Harvard males in 1937 until their death ... very recently. It's very interesting to see what came of the lives of some of the most privileged kids - the ones that "had everything going for them."

Bad T-Bill Auction

Megan McCardle explains why that could be bad.

WH Correspondants' Dinner

Here's the video of Obama's roast. Pretty darn funny - some good jabs at Michael Steele, Geithner, Cheney ... and himself.

Religion and Science

A few related things I've come across in the last few days:

- Mike Pence can't admit he believes in evolution, and Chris Matthews explains why that makes the GOP less-credible on policy issues - especially energy, enviro, climate change (how is the science mixed if you don't believe in science?) issues that are science-laden.

- Francis Collins, the devout Christian and evolutionary scientist who ran the Human Genome Project is starting a blog, Biologos, to help reconcile faith and science.

- The results of a new study on genetic diversity in Africa shows that Africans are more genetically divers than the rest of the wold combined! Cataloging genetic mutations (something that Collins studies as well) is big for medicine and may also take anthropology out of the digs and into the genetic labs.

The More You Know .... (do-de-do-de-doot)

Felix Salmon reports that the more you know about how much energy you're using - the less you use!

Enter Google, which has now announced plans to release free PowerMeter software which will map any individual’s energy use on their phone, home computer, or iGoogle homepage. The little gizmo which plugs in to your fusebox is going to be very cheap, and with any luck will somehow be available for free to anybody who might have difficulty paying for it. (This is part of Google’s philanthropic google.org arm, after all.)

Our Future as a Financial Colony

(via Ezra) MUST READ: Brad DeLong offers an answer to the question I've had for a while: "Sure, foreign governments own a lot of our debt - and a bunch of T-bills, but since they can't afford to unload them and sink the world economy, where will they invest?"

Brad thinks they'll buy and control corporate securities:

So what is likely to come to pass is not the socialism feared by the Right—at least not ownership of the means of production by the U.S. government. Instead, it will be ownership of U.S. companies by foreign governments—and on a scale we’ve never before seen.

Can anything stop this progression? Yes. A collapse of world economic growth—which would create a very dangerous and angry world. Or a sudden return to thrift on the part of American consumers—so that we can finance the industrialization of the rest of the world rather than having them finance our consumption. But neither is likely.

A Hole In the Center

Ross makes a good point in today's NYT - and I think it holds for some swing-vote liberals as well - that most moderates are just good at making deals, not really rooted in a center ideology and therefore they end up making the good the enemy of the perfect! (I'm saying that backwards purposefully).

To Err is Human - To Invest is One HUGE Error.

A guest essay by Syd O'Banion concerning chapter 12 of John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment:

Tyler Durden once said, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." He must have one hell of a Keynsian invisible friend. John Maynard "Father of Time" Keynes put down some common sense ideas in the near obsolete vernacular of proper english and a lot of these ideas explain the farce that has become of today's investment banking, in particular the role of confidence as it relates to a stock's value.

Keynes truthfully notes that until humans build space ships and develop ESP we have not shot at consistently predicting the future and definitely not during "abnormal" times that we are in today:

A conventional valuation which is established as the outcome of the mass psychology of a large number of ignorant individuals is liable to change violently as the result of a sudden fluctuation of opinion due to factors which do not really make much difference to the prospective yield; since there will be no strong roots of conviction to hold it steady. In abnormal times in particular, when the hypothesis of an indefinite continuance of the existing state of affairs is less plausible than usual even though there are no express grounds to anticipate a definite change, the market will be subject to waves of optimistic and pessimistic sentiment, which are unreasoning and yet in a sense legitimate where no solid basis exists for a reasonable calculation.

But you say, the Obama and the Federalettes are passing out bailouts during the 7:30 performance to encourage the stimulation of lending and credit. Fail.

A collapse in the price of equities, which has had disastrous reactions on the marginal efficiency of capital, may have been due to the weakening either of speculative confidence or of the state of credit. But whereas the weakening of either is enough to cause a collapse, recovery requires the revival of both. For whilst the weakening of credit is sufficient to bring about a collapse, its strengthening, though a necessary condition of recovery, is not a sufficient condition.

Yikes. Well once this thing stabilizes (hopefully before 2020) we might be able to get back to hearing Eddie Money's 1987 hit "Business as Usual." Well actually, no, because much of the gains of the last decade or more have come about from using the hysterics of confidence to create a Las Vegas-like bubble in the housing and financial sectors.

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.

People have played the stock market like a casino, Performing thousands of transactions for the short term gain. Investments were originally directly tied to the creator of the business venture, therefore making his stake in the business' success a personal matter. With the invention of stocks however an investor could put money into a venture but swap his investment for another if his confidence in the venture were to waiver.

I'm sure Kramer would say, ''that's how you make the $$$$" but Keynes would disagree. He in fact thinks we'd be better off in a European Welfare State, where as in London, the heavy taxes impede the ability to quickly transfer stocks. Somewhere Rush Limbaugh is trying to roll over in his sleeping casket but is unable.

The jobber’s “turn”, the high brokerage charges and the heavy transfer tax payable to the Exchequer, which attend dealings on the London Stock Exchange, sufficiently diminish the liquidity of the market (although the practice of fortnightly accounts operates the other way) to rule out a large proportion of the transactions characteristic of Wall Street.^[5] The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available, with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise in the United States.

Keynes-daddy questions about ability to even manage the "convention" of stocks due to the instability of human nature to act morally towards there future. Humans fallible? I think whole religions are based on that fact.

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits — of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

Keynes gets a bit Darwinical too - spouting that we are not predisposed to making decision solely on numbers. That no matter what our most objective desire is we still tend to act on instinct or gut feelings. Somewhere in Texas an ex-president is fondly reminiscing about the last 8 years.

We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance

If this isn't a "d**g-slapping" of any Secretary of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and interest rate hawk out there I don't know what is. As Clinton should have said, "It's about the confidence, stupid". Interest rates, in all there man made glory, have no effect on the system. Long term planning and regulation is the point to be followed.

For my own part I am now somewhat sceptical of the success of a merely monetary policy directed towards influencing the rate of interest. I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organising investment; since it seems likely that the fluctuations in the market estimation of the marginal efficiency of different types of capital, calculated on the principles I have described above, will be too great to be offset by any practicable changes in the rate of interest.

In finution, stocks are a sham, basing an economy on stocks makes for a sham economy, the ability to deflect failure via stock trades promotes risky behavior, and if this has not been figured out since the time of ziggurats, every human convention made or invented has the distinct weakness of being run by humans. If you've seen The Wire you'll know what I'm talking about.

Torture Memos

I know I've been busy and the blog's taken a hit - but I'm gearing up to learn more about the results of the DOJ internal investigation into the torture memos that will be released Thursday. Apparently, from the leaks, the DOJ is going to refer Bybee, Yoo and the other guy to their respective bar associations - that means they did something unethical and the bar associations will decide what to do.

Doubt that any prosecutions will come of it - especially since it's the DOJ investigating the DOJ. But I guess I'm ok with it as long as everything's aired out - whichapparently includes the fact that Bybee wanted a seat on the 9th circuit, so they put him in OLC - then asked for memos - got them - and now he's on the 9th. Apparently this is what Judgment at Nurembeurg was about.

Brooks

...is on his game today:

But the Republican Party has mis-learned that history. The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concern

Toon

How we Talk About Powerful Women

Jeff Rosen has a critical piece on Judge Sonia Sotomayor in TNR, and Rebecca Traister has a good response over at Salon pointing out Rosen's ease perpetuating the male-centered language and ideas.

Isn't that Called the Human Flu?

I heard on NPR this morning that a pig caught swine flu from a human!! They're wondering if the viral strain has changed. But I find it amusing that they found out a pig was sick - did he have a scratchy throat? Maybe his ham hocks were achy? He should have washed his hooves in muddy slop after after interacting with those sickly humans....

A President Who Understands Things and can Explain Them

.... Ah how nice it is to have one like that - remember the last guy? Here's Obama on the pig flu:

somebody asked, why is this different from other flus? We don't know for certain that this will end up being more severe than other seasonal flus that we have had. It's been noted I think before that you have over 36,000 die on average every year from seasonal flus; you've have 200,000 hospitalizations.

It may turn out that H1N1 runs its course like ordinary flus, in which case we will have prepared and we won't need all these preparations. The reason that people are concerned is -- the scientists are concerned -- is this is a new strain. So what happens is, is that Americans and people around the world have not built up immunity in the same way that they've built up immunity to the seasonal flus that we're accustomed to. Those seasonal flus may change, mutate slightly from year to year, but they're all roughly in the same band. When you have a new strain, then potentially our immune systems can't deal with it as effectively. And there are indications that in Mexico, at least, what you saw were relatively young, healthy people die from these -- from the H1N1, rather than people whose immune system is already compromised -- older individuals, very small infants, and so forth.

Chrysler Bankruptcy

Obama called out hedge fund investors by name and said they were selfish and didn't pull any weight in trying to keep Chrysler above water. Ezra Klein says that Bloom (a Harvard MBA labor guy) may be weighing on Obama's thinking:

New Yorker writer Peter Boyer recalls a talk Bloom gave three years ago to a group of insolvency lawyers and accountants. In it, he described a hypothetical restructuring, and argued that you needed to think of both the workers and the bondholders as having made the equivalent of "loans" to the company. The difference was that the bondholder had settled on clear terms. They could end the relationship at any time by selling the bond on the open market. Labor's "loan," however, could not be cashed out. If the company failed to honor future obligations to workers, the money was, for labor, simply lost. Bloom explained:

They worked a lifetime and deferred a significant amount of current compensation in exchange for the company’s promise that, upon their retirement, they would be paid a fixed stream of cash and provided with help with their medical bills. Then, without their knowledge or consent, the company chose to not set aside enough money to honor that promise. In effect, the company borrowed money from them without even discussing the terms of the loan....So what we have is a bunch of old men and widows being forced to lend the company, for whom they worked a lifetime, some portion of the value of their pension and their health care. This loan was made on terms on which they have no input and they have no ability to liquidate their position.

Labor, in other words, has no ability to liquidate. The hedge funds do. And in the case of Chrysler, the workers have seen their position brutally and quickly reduced, with very little input from them. The hedge fund, conversely, refused to liquidate their own position, and demanded ever more favorable terms from the government. And Obama, it seems, quickly grew to judge their position repellent.