What the hell does James Inhofe being a Senator or ‘the sequestration’ have to do with the disaster that befell these people in Moore, OK. ‘Sorry about you losing loved ones and all but could you vote a different way? Or at least get a majority of other people in your state to vote a different way since actually I have no way of knowing how you voted, I’m just going by average numbers, which is dumb, and even in the reddest of red states at least 25-30% of people voted (D), meaning in those cases my admonition to you makes no sense, but whatever. I’m a professor’?
This reaction is the height of selfishness. It’s all about how it affects Juan Cole. And ‘affects’ is used almost-infinitely loosely here, because the effect we’re talking about is the very diffuse effect of OK sending (R) Senators and Congressman to DC X% more consistently than the average state, which affects votes on national policy to a degree of something not exceeding X times 1/50, and some of those policies end up being policies that Juan Cole doesn’t like and wishes were different (albeit even of those, the policies he doesn’t like probably don’t affect Juan Cole in any measurable way).
Stack that up against strangers losing their loved ones and Juan Cole, weighing his priorities, decided that his small-minded and retarded party-politics screed just had to be aired.
What sort of person could write such a piece. What sort of mind sees a devastating, deadly tornado and turns immediately to party politics. A soulless, monstrous creep of a little, little man that’s who.
Why is this man a professor? Other professors have been hounded and drummed out of their positions for writing things far, far less offensive.
Seeing scattered talk on the right about whether Obamacare will lead to a sudden insurance-premium sticker stock. I would advise that this doesn’t really make sense. There is a danger here of being perceived as crying-wolf.
Will employees with health care plans see their ‘premiums’ suddenly go up next year? Um, maybe? But maybe not. This really requires asking ourselves: what is a ‘premium’?
You go to a job. Your employer gives you Compensation. What is that Compensation? Some of it is Money. (This is the best form of Compensation IMHO.) Other Compensation might be 401(k) matching, stock options, etc. But some of it is in the form of Signing You Up For A Health Plan (and reducing your Money Compensation).
Is that what people are referring to as their ‘premium’? The nominal pay reduction the company tells you you’re taking for being in a Health Plan? Notice that you don’t actually ‘pay’ that ‘premium’. Instead what happens is you get a smaller paycheck than the (theoretical) paycheck your company tells you you’d be getting if you had no health plan (which is usually impossible – isn’t it? at least, although I’ve never tried it, I presume you’d have to submit a whole bunch of paperwork to decline your company’s health care plan altogether, even pre-Obamacare).
So if that’s what is meant by ‘premium’, that number doesn’t have to ‘go up’ at all. Even if insurance costs will indeed soar, and the result will indeed be passed onto employees, there’s more than one way to do that. Money is fungible. The employee doesn’t necessarily have to be shown a literal increase in the form of the nominal ‘premium’ their employer tells them they’re literally ‘paying’.
Maybe you just don’t get that pay raise you would’ve otherwise gotten (or smaller than otherwise).
Maybe your company just puts a freeze on promotions so any promotion you would’ve otherwise gotten is effectively pushed back by a year or three.
Maybe they cut back on perks, expense compensation, etc.
Maybe your company reduces headcount and loads the extra work onto the remaining employees, like you.
All of these things would be meaningful setbacks and reduce your effective hourly Compensation, in direct response to the increasing cost of insurance. But none of them would be instances of your ‘premium’ actually rising.
The problem with screaming ‘premiums will rise!’ is that accounting can hide any such ‘rise’ and thereby lull people into thinking dumb things like: ‘golly, look at my new health-care pamphlet, Obamacare isn’t costing me any extra at all like the ‘wingers said it would!’ When you hear this – as, I think, you inevitably will – please just remember how dumb a thought it is, and keep in mind that just because a cost isn’t explicit doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Something about Elizabeth Warren seems to bring out the dumbest in left-leaning commentators. A year or two ago it was some stupid GIF that people were posting on their Facebook with a stupid quote from her on it and her head tilted in that ‘concerned/caring’ manner and the quote was about as deep and as wide as saying ‘share the wealth mmkay?’. Was it a smart statement? Dumb statement? The truth is that it wasn’t even worth apprehending or wasting brain cells thinking about; it may as well have been your kid’s daycare worker telling him to share his Legos. You don’t reason with that or argue with that (or for that matter, agree with that), you just came to pick up your kid and get the heck home.
Who in the world made that GIF? And why? Who exactly read that quote from Elizabeth Warren and said ‘you know what? That quote’s so brilliant I’m going to make a GIF out of it”? How dumb does a mind have to have been to have been impressed by that quote? I dare not even speculate. I just ate.
Anyway, it worked, because the left swooned. Their brains shut down. And who can blame them? The background of the GIF was a nonthreatening gray. The woman, whoever she was, had a round soft haircut. Glasses bespoke intelligence. You felt like she was your college professor or perhaps more likely, some kind of administrator with vague responsibilities involving lots of Meetings. Hand in motion in front of her as if she was talking. Talking directly to them. Hey! I like ladies who talk with their hands! She must know what she’s talking about!
Culturally, that image was a knockout punch. That’s exactly who Smart People want running things. Round face round hair glasses-wearing pants-suit nonthreateningly-plain-looking white (but ‘diverse’!) daycare-center-coordinator type who vaguely wants to share the wealth. Say no more. You had them at ‘mmkay?’. It was the entire package. None of them knew the first thing about who this ‘Elizabeth Warren’ (also – a great name! she sounds like a serious person!) was but they all knew one thing, they wanted to make her be a Senator or whatever the heck it was she was running for, wherever the heck it was.
And so now she is, so we’re stuck paying attention to her. On the basis of the reasoning outlined above. That’s how our system works. That’s how Smart People make their decisions. GIFs on Facebook. They look at the GIF. And think ‘I don’t know anything about that person but she mouthed the right platitude and looks like the type of person I want to be in charge of everything’. Maybe she reminded SWPL-type White People of their (soccer) moms? Whatever the explanation, just remember the Warren-Facebook Phenomenon next time you’re tempted to think Smart People are actually smart.
If the problem with lowering the student loan rate to the discount window rate is that it’s too fiscally costly, then making it a one-year measure is the solution.
Logic: If making it a one-year measure is ‘the solution’ then wouldn’t it stand to reason that making it a zero-year measure is an even better solution? If the problem with eating two piles of shit is that it tastes bad, is ‘the solution’ to eat only one pile of shit?
But in the short term with unemployment more than 7 percent and the inflation rate running well below the Federal Reserve’s self-imposed 2.5 percent threshold, there’s nothing wrong with having the federal government lose money.
Got that? There’s ‘nothing wrong with’ having the federal government lose money. A nice little reminder that these are exactly the type of people we want to be in charge of everything. Smart People. To lose your money in Smart ways.
Seriously, how dumb is this going to get? I am afraid. Senators have 6-year terms; that’s a long time for the entire lefty commentariat to get continually, monotonically dumber.
Anyway, perhaps I missed it but when did we all decide that we need to send even more fricking people to college, to come out with a degree and nowhere to use it (and debt, albeit low interest debt – it’s still debt)? And, is college tuition somehow too low after decades of inflating tuition rates with easy-money student-loans that we want to inflate tuition even more by spraying even more (now, lower-interest!) federal money at all the universities’ loan offices? And of course when tuition climbs in response to sap up/rent-seek at this newly-Warren-inflated federal student-loan trough, and you give all these kids this debt, how exactly are you doing them a favor by charging them X% lower ‘interest’ if their (non-BK-dischargeable!) principal is actually 2X% higher? Or, where is the actual analysis that convinced all these Smart People that this isn’t what would happen?
Or do Smart People not even get that far in their reasoning? As happens all too often the reasoning indeed seems to be utterly first-order, stopping entirely at Step One: ‘college degrees good, so give more loans to get college degrees = good’. But come on. Usually the reasoning is at least better than this. It really just seems to be the case that Elizabeth Warren – whoever the heck she is – makes people dumber. Especially Smart People.
Is the fix for credit rating agencies to create an ‘open-source’ rating agency, i.e. yet another federally-deputized bond-blesser, but an ‘open-source’ one therefore (presumably) for Occupy hipsters to work for? Me I still vote for no federally-deputized bond-blessers.
The actual data doesn’t seem to indicate that Hispanics vote, or not, based on big immigration bills. The Stupid Party doesn’t care about actual data though.
Why David Simon doesn’t tweet. Like one needs a reason.
Yglesias makes the argument that the answer to bubble hangovers is to make people work harder. The argument is actually compelling. So I assume this means that in a downturn he would advocate, at the very least, (1) not extending unemployment insurance, (2) reducing regulations and taxes to make it easier and cheaper to employ labor. He certainly wouldn’t be in favor of slapping a giant new cost-of-hiring-people onto employers in the form of a national health care overhaul, but with a healthcare-welfare backstop for those who don’t get it. We want more people working! I mean, right?
There was no surge in IRS tax-exempt applications in 2010. This is a good time to point out that sometimes people who are Informed and Keep Up With The News can be dumber than people who ignore all this nonsense. If you like me know some lefties who are Informed, they read this or that Kevin Ezra Drum Klein piece that feverishly laid out the talking-points for them, the catechism, which began like: “You see, back in 2010, the IRS was faced with a mountain of applications…” Satisfied, these Informed lefties nodded their heads sagely, then put down the piece, and stopped paying attention to this issue. ‘I understand. I have a good talking-point now’. They told this talking-point to anyone who would listen. That’s what being Informed is for! Quickly and efficiently collecting easy-to-remember talking-points that reaffirm what you already wanted to believe. Do you notice the later story which says, Uh, no, there wasn’t really any such surge? Of course not. Of course you don’t. Not that I pretend to know who’s right here. I don’t think it’s worth sorting through. The main point is that Pundits are not engaged in giving truth; the truth-value of what they write is roughly 0. Disclaimer: I’m not a Pundit, technically. My truth-value is more like 0.35.
“What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,” Matthews said.
“So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,” Matthews continued. “But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.”
Why, it’s almost as if President Obama was just some goofy, spoiled activist who had no meaningful executive experience – or any other kind of relevant experience for being the President for that matter – or something.
Next up on the Chris Matthews show – I can only assume – ‘Maybe a guy being ‘Cool’ isn’t such a great proxy for how good of a leader he will be after all?’
If you want to know a riskless, free-option trade, it’s student loans, apparently. I heard this from (I gather) Econ Prof. Noah Smith on Twitter. Student loans are riskless for the government and they make the government a free profit (with, did I mention, no risk). You guys should all go all-in into SLABS now. (<—Note: NOT actual investment advice)
His arguments involved two main factors: (1) historically-realized default rates/severities, and (2) the purportedly low correlation in student-loan portfolios, again by which I assume he means historical/realized. Both of these relate to the magic of portfolio theory (which apparently, according to Econ Profs, makes risk go away, i.e. idiosyncratic risk becomes riskless if it’s bundled into a portfolio) and are indeed great prospective risk metrics which, I think you’ll agree, served us so very well during the subprime/CDO crisis. I think some investment bank should quickly snap up Noah Smith to be their Fixed-Income Chief Risk Officer.
I can’t link to any of this because he seems to have blocked me, or whatever bizarrely pussy/cowardly move it is that people do on Twitter that makes me suddenly not be able to find the tweet back-and-forths we’d been sending. (Sorry, I’m still kinda new to Twitter, maybe someday I’ll figure out how to do that pussy move too). So you’ll have to take my word for it. But I did want to record for posterity that I got this hot trade idea of riskless student loans from a Econ Prof, and what it was based on. You’re welcome.
This is exactly the kind of wagon-circling silliness that I think post-Nixon impeachment-fetishism engenders. The whole piece is Jamelle Bouie sweating out a fever-dream that President Obama will be impeached. Why does he care? Because Obama is His Guy and so that would Make Him Feel Bad. I guess. I dunno. But that’s the whole piece. “If there’s a problem”, he sputters (“if”! he can’t even bring himself to say there’s a problem!), it’s that it provides “fodder” for conservatives. That’s how scared of ‘impeachment’ he is.
It happens every time. Any time there’s a scandal or misdeed, the first thought of the Incumbent Defenders is ‘oh noes what if the other side says this is impeachable’ and the first thought of the out-of-powers is ‘hey maybe this is impeachable and we can finally get him?’
And so of course in the meantime there is no room for serious discussion let alone actual contemplation of the actual things that these people in our government did: target political enemies for extra tax scrutiny, and lie about the cause of an attack on our country to prevent electoral embarrassment.
The important thing to remember, as always, is that it is moot. No President will be impeached. Ever again. (I’m not even sure any Presidents will ever lose their second-term re-elections ever again. At most, once in a blue moon.) Ok?
So here’s a deal for the Jamelle Bouies of the world: I’ll metaphysically promise not to ‘impeach’ President Obama, if you’ll promise to wake up, open your freaking eyes, and actually think and talk about the substance (if you’re capable, that is) of what people in government do or don’t do, so that errors, mistakes, and bad decisions can be meaningfully critiqued and (perish the thought!) corrected. This stupid ‘impeachment’ threat (do (R)s even really want to impeach Obama and wake up to President Biden?) is a pointless albatross that prevents all serious discussion. Of everything. And since I don’t believe for a microsecond that it has any chance of happening anyway (remember: Obama is cool, and black), I don’t really feel like it’s giving anything up.
The latest in what seems to be an endless line of Open Borders posts to use something I wrote as Exhibit A wonders why countries are ‘morally relevant’. So if that sounds like the sort of thing that’s right up your alley click over and give it a read. Then come back here and explain it to me because I can’t make heads or tails of what ‘moral relevance’ is supposed to mean there.
I’m too busy anyway, making arrangements for some distant relatives of mine from, oh let’s say, Krasnoyarsk Siberia to come to this country, show up on the doorstep of, and bunk indefinitely with the author of that piece, since after all, surely houses/lots/apartments (whatever applies) also have no ‘moral relevance’, so why the heck not.
Alex Koppelman in the New Yorkersuggests that one aspect of Benghazi-gate is disproved by the evidence. What evidence?:
From the very beginning of the editing process, the talking points contained the erroneous assertion that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved.” That’s an important fact, because the right has always criticized the Administration based on the suggestion that the C.I.A. and the State Department, contrary to what they said, knew that the attack was not spontaneous and not an outgrowth of a demonstration.
I had to read this twice to understand why he thought this was an ‘important fact’. Then I realized what he’s saying. He’s saying that since a stupid lie about the attack being prompted by a stupid Youtube video was In The Talking Points All Along, that exonerates the administration of lying.
It couldn’t, of course, just be that the first draft of the ‘talking points’ had a lie in them from the get-go. That first draft was golden, it was handed down by God.
I still want to understand how the left justifies the ‘Sam Bacile’/Youtube video spin surrounding the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attack. How they justify President Obama going around apologizing, waving his fingers, and nagging that the future must not be won by people who make unseen, stupid Youtube videos. Or whatever he said. I know there are other aspects of Benghazi to discuss and hash out (like whether Obama said to stand down, etc.) but this is the one I really, really don’t get. How on earth do they justify or explain that behavior without embarrassment or at least a modicum of introspective self-awareness that hey, it seems like the administration was spouting a bunch of phony bullshit for some reason?
Seriously: what’s the actual party line of the wagon-circlers, the noble defenders of the Administration? Anyone know? I would genuinely like to know what it is but I don’t want to have to wade through hundreds of lefty MSM pieces and blog posts covered in layers and layers of spin and BS just in order to suss it out. It’s hard enough to read something like that New Yorker piece.
Mind you, my assumption has always (at least once the trickle of news made it possible to piece this together) been that there’s a perfectly good explanation for why Obama & co. spouted that Youtube BS: Benghazi was some kind of ill-conceived covert op, and they were scrambling trying to paper a cover-story over it, do damage-control, and avoid the embarrassment of its being fully exposed. Which – you know something? – would be fair enough! I think we’re all grownups enough to understand that covert ops will exist and that it’s not great, to say the least, if they’re exposed by enemy attacks. The problem is that the way the lefties have circled the wagons, we can’t even get to that square one because they’re still pretending there was nothing amiss about the President prancing around pretending that it was all a response to a freaking Youtube video. Or are they? Did they acknowledge that phony BS in passing somewhere and I missed it? Again, that’s very possible. I don’t go through my life wanting to have to read a bunch of lefties all the time, after all. But someone’s gotta do it.
“Gone after.” Groups of Americans. Trying to peaceably do stuff.
I don’t pretend to know what a “501(c)4s” but am I really the only one disturbed by this? Again: the problem is our tax code, including section 501(c)4, whatever that is. Having a tax code like this essentially makes it a foregone conclusion that a federal agency will collect intrusive data on people and groups of people, will investigate them and their (peaceful, law-abiding) activities, will ask probing and privacy-invading questions about them, and do so without always being free of the normal all-too-human bias that all humans have – and when that happens, such an approach to taxation also inevitably means that that nice clean cut young commentators like Ezra Klein will write things like “THEY SHOULD’VE GONE AFTER ALL OF THEM!!” about groups of their fellow citizens.
By all means, let’s investigate. The investigation, by the way, will find fault with some IRS employees but will exonerate the IRS of doing anything ‘political’. That will be a false conclusion. Everything is ‘political’. Even under the most innocent explanation of these actions, an IRS employee saying ‘we need a quick and dirty way to filter for potential fake 501(c)4s – hey what about those Tea Party groups I keep hearing about?’ is not living in a political vacuum; there is a reason ‘Tea Party’ is what came to his mind, what he ‘keeps hearing about’, rather than, say, ‘black churches’. And that reason has everything to do with politics.
But whatever. Again: such things are inevitable when you charge and empower the IRS with doing the things we have charged and empowered them with doing. I can already see the Smart People consensus lesson of this scandal taking shape: 1. the IRS needs to ‘go after’ people more neutrally (or at least find neutral-seeming filters to disproportionately-trap whoever they’d rather trap), by 2. ‘going after’ more people, more energetically and ruthlessly.
I guess I am in the minority then in not wishing for the country to move yet further in that direction.
Notice that when Benghazi is not about whether anything will or can rise to the level of ‘impeachable’ (which is moot), it’s all about Hillary Clinton’s prospects for winning the Presidency in 2016. It’s either circle-the-wagons-around-our-leader-mascot (so as not to suffer a vicarious political setback which would make lefties feel bad), or a meta-discussion over what qualities are required of a President.
And what qualities are those, you ask? Answer: being a (D) and being able to win the Presidency. The left believes Hillary Clinton might qualify in this sense, i.e. might be able to win an election in 2016, and therefore they simply can’t tolerate any talk that anything about Benghazi might make her not be President let alone not be ‘qualified’ to be President.
Because what is ‘qualified’ anyway, in our age of Smart People credentialism? To Smart People, being ‘qualified’ is an objective matter that consists of getting the right items onto your resume, and/or having the right identity (e.g. Obama was qualified to be President because he was kinda black but not too black). And…that’s it. What you actually do or not-do or accomplish or say or decide or achieve doesn’t matter. At least, Smart People don’t want it to matter.
Why would they? If being qualified is simply a matter of getting the right degrees, credentials, and titles on a corporate- or government-ladder, then Smart People know how to navigate that. Their parents set them up nicely to be successful in such a world. But the idea that qualification has something to do with the actual decisions you make once there scares Smart People to death. In the end, this is why the Smart People left is so obstinate and ‘bored’ and denialist on the issue of Benghazi: they can’t afford, psychologically, to truly confront anything about it or discuss it seriously, because it has to do with actual tangible decisions, and weighing right and wrong. Smart People want nothing to do with a world in which those things matter, and so can’t allow criticism of Hillary Clinton on anything like those grounds to take root.
Politics in such an environment is broken, of course. Errors in governance cannot be sanely discussed let alone criticized, analyzed, and corrected. Nobody cares about such errors. They care about careers, and in the case of leaders, the vicarious importance of those careers to what they themselves can accomplish. It is a pure status game; nothing will be improved, nothing will be truly achieved, mistakes will not be corrected. That’s why when the left continually says that Benghazi is a big fat nothing and that they are ‘bored’ by it, I have to admit, I am too.
Avik Roy says the Oregon-Medicaid study results are even worse than they look. The whole piece is worth reading but he mentions among other things this fact:
1. 40 percent of those who ‘won’ the Oregon Medicaid lottery didn’t bother to sign up
According to the authors, “only about 60% of those selected [to join the Medicaid program] sent back applications.” Indeed, of the 35,169 individuals who “won” the Oregon Medicaid lottery, only 10,405 enrolled, in large part due to this indifference from the supposed Medicaid beneficiaries, and also because a number of individuals failed in the end to meet the Medicaid eligibility requirements.
In a real randomized, controlled clinical trial, the kind that drug companies must conduct to get past the FDA, you would have to count these individuals as part of your study cohort, in what statisticians call an “intention-to-treat” analysis.
I had cited the same problem, but then got snagged by a commenter fred who suggested that the authors controlled for it. Then later commenter WT said no, not so much, and showed a blurb indicating the authors did something that (to me) seems really hacky and hand-wavy.
I don’t really know what to think at this point, but it does appear that the original impression given by Conventional Wisdom commentary on this study – that it was the ‘gold standard’ scientific method of a Randomized Controlled Trial, is pretty bogus.
This just takes me back to and reaffirms my original point, which is that it is silly to try to derive (or, more commonly, pretend that you are deriving) public-policy from the results of social-science research. Not only is social-science research, usually, hopelessly fuzzy and open to multiple interpretations (as in this case), but even when it’s not, people just cherry-pick results they like to support their preconceived preferences.
On the matter of the IRS targeting certain groups, it’s easy for folks on the right to lazily assume lefties are waving the scandal away, like they usually do. Especially if (like me) they barely read any lefties, or at least find it painful to do so in any detail. So here’s just a few I’ve seen who deserve props for being principled and saying the matter deserves investigation:
I whine and snark so much when they say & do things that in my view are self-contradictory or unprincipled that it’s especially incumbent upon someone like me to point out when they’re actually doing the right thing.
The tax code with its ‘nonprofit status’ type categories makes such questions inevitable and if you don’t like it what exactly are you complaining about? Whether you realize it or not you are complaining about having such things as a ‘nonprofit status’ in the first place. So what are you going to do about it? Nothing, because having a gigantically complicated tax code, but then rebates for being Nice, is Nice. Everyone agrees about that.
A slightly smarter complaint would be to say that the IRS abused its discretion in a politicized way. This is true but again, what did you expect? The tax code is written in a way that makes abusive intrusive privacy-invading questions inevitable, at least of some people. Then it is enforced by a bureaucracy. That bureaucracy being politicized isn’t some unfortunate accident, it is to be expected and anything else would be shocking.
So really, what did you expect? If you don’t like any of these things let’s simplify the tax code or even eliminate it. But no one’s advocating that. So here we are.
Dumb story that rating agencies are ‘wary of GOP debt limit bill’/prioritization. Not because it will make the US any more likely to default, but, just, because they’re ‘wary’. Silly me, I thought a credit rating was supposed to be a gauge of the likelihood of actual default. Prioritization is not default, so what do they care? I chalk it up more to the spin of the journalist doing the story than anything the ‘credit raters’ themselves said.
Overrated, irritating-film filmmaker Danny Boyle laments that the ‘Pixarification of movies’ wipes out adult storytelling. You know, like in The Beach, where Leonardo DiCaprio discovers a free-love island paradise. Or Millions, where a little kid finds a million pounds or something and (I actually forget, but it sure was colorful!).
Congrats to sometime/onetime RWCG reader Xamuel for finishing his PhD.
Brilliant investor genius Warren Buffet’s $600 million interest-free taxpayer loan. But he wants to raise taxes on (mostly) people with less money than himself, so he’s a good guy.
Blogs & Chop’ts Economy update: Yglesias says immigrants create jobs because of all the Spanish-language Cosmo’s you can sell to them, or something.
Rule Of Law update: Matt Levine tells a weird story of Chesapeake neglecting to call some bonds in time per the docs, but a judge saying it doesn’t matter what the docs say it just matters what the bankers & Chesapeake intended them to say in their private discussions. At least it sure sounds like that’s what happened, which (if so) is BS.
Understandably, some people are ready & eager to sign up to be on the health-care welfare rolls, and don’t understand why some taxpayers aren’t that thrilled about having their paychecks further garnished in order to give them welfare. It’s so hard to understand because them being-given-money is great so what’s the problem.
I’ve never been any kind of pro-Apple cult member but the ongoing weird campaign to make Apple seem to be in trouble and (over)read tea leaves to that effect seems really weird to me. UPDATE: Another example. It’s so weird! Someone must own a lot of puts or something.
Regarding the twist at the end of the tale that Leia is actually Luke’s sister, Hamill suggested as an alternative: “Why not have Boba Fett remove his helmet, shake out some beautiful hair, and…Oh my god, it’s mom! She’s been a double agent all these years!”
Danko Jones: no such thing as a musical ‘guilty pleasure’. I guess that means I can pull by Best of the Brady Bunch album out of storage. Maureen McCormick was an underrated singer you know.
As everyone knows, Canada does everything right, financial-regulation-wise, on account of how they’re kinda-sorta French. Meanwhile, no-down mortgages still exist.
Brad DeLong makes an interesting comparison/contrast of the dynamics of the London Whale to Ben Bernanke, in a post only really marred by odd typos and repeatedly referring to the CDX index as “CBX”. The main reason I link it though is because the basic story outline he paints of what happened in the London Whale trade is essentially the same one I diagnosed here in this space last year, a few days after the story broke. Has that diagnosis really now become such conventional wisdom that even Brad DeLong goes with it? Because I don’t ever seem to have gotten the credit for it. Credit! I want credit! Leave your credit in comments,
(UPDATE: To illustrate why I’m so surprised that Delong’s (i.e. my) narrative of the London Whale trade dynamic seems to have become conventional wisdom, let’s just flash back to 4/18/12 when Jesse Eisinger called my explanation/reaction cynical. But now it’s essentially the same as that of Professor J. BradFord DeLong.)
I’ve recently been reminded (see here, here) that a favorite libertarian spin on illegal immigration is to fantasize/pretend that illegal immigrants are coming here in response to ‘job offers’, that all they are doing is ‘selling their labor’.
In the open-borders fantasy, apparently what happens is that employers have job openings and fret ‘how shall we fill these job openings?’ and then what happens is that they send ‘job offers’, by mail or email or perhaps by telegram?, to faraway non-citizens currently living in Mexico or Somalia or Vietnam or wherever. AND THAT’S THE ONLY REASON THEY COME HERE. Because of a ‘job offer’.
This is a very clever spin, and understandable for spin geared toward libertarian-minded (like me), because it papers over the entire question of the actual nation-state’s border enforcement and converts the issue into mere free association. ‘How dare you restrict immigration? They just wanted to contract their labor out to someone who gave them a job offer!’ Etc.
The person saying this cannot possibly believe in the ‘job-offer’/'just contracting for their labor’ picture of illegal immigration, yet persists in saying it. It is disingenuous nonsense that pollutes the debate. I wonder what a smart and honest open-borders advocate like Vipul Naik has to say about that.
OMG! That’s a long ti…wait, how long is the ‘recorded human history’ of carbon dioxide levels anyway?
There’s an answer to that, and that answer is: about 55 years.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has steadily risen from 317 parts per million in 1958, when measurements began, to 400.
So…that’s, kind of a long time? Maybe? But for some reason they didn’t headline the article ‘Carbon dioxide levels highest since at least 1957′. You think ‘recorded human history’, you think maybe 2000-3000 years. Nope.
In any event, as every schoolchild learns – or at least learned when I was one – carbon dioxide is what plants breathe. So I guess we can all look forward to a lush, green future. At least, no less green than it was in 1957.
Benghazi is not worth discussing because although I don’t know any real information about it, if something bad were uncovered and seriously contemplated, that might reflect badly on the Obama administration. If something seriously bad were uncovered I hear that might lead to calls for impeachment.
Things that reflect badly on the Obama administration make us feel bad because Obama is cool and has the letter D after his name, and so we vicariously identify with the trajectory and maintenance of his power, as against the bad guys, whom we hate and wish to experience setbacks.
Things that threaten to lead to his removal from power really make us feel bad, because that’s a setback for us. A mega, multi-point setback.
Therefore, Benghazi is not worth discussing or thinking about.
Relatedly: nothing else is worth discussing or thinking about, either.
Thanks for reading my lefty Benghazi blog post. Any comments? Let me know in comments. (Comments actually about Benghazi will be deleted.)
UPDATE: Did you see that spoof video with Obama as Daniel Day-Lewis as Obama? Funny stuff! We like how Obama is cool and has a sense of humor like that. It makes us feel like Obama connects with us, on a cultural level. Because of the coolness.
From time to time (because the current President is a (D)) you see people on the right musing/fantasizing over the possibility of President Obama being impeached and removed from office over this or that. Lately the Benghazi attack has bubbled to the surface again as the impetus for a potential ‘impeachment’.
I think my compatriots on the right need to understand that this is fantasyland because ‘impeachment’ of a President, as a practical matter, is a historical, vestigial curiosity that is no longer a part of our political system. I know that it’s written there in the Constitution but so are lots of things.
Nobody is going to be ‘impeached’. Seriously.
Specifically in the case of Benghazi, there is literally no metaphysically-possible turn of events or fact pattern to be unearthed that could or would realistically lead to President Obama being ‘impeached’ and then removed from office because of Benghazi. I don’t care if President Obama actually participated in the attack on Benghazi, incognito. Led the charge himself. Doesn’t matter. He WILL NOT be impeached and removed from the office of the Presidency, so get it out of your heads.
If you’re wondering when exactly impeachment/removal of Presidents was de facto written out of our political system for good, I’ll give you the exact date so that you may know precisely who – and whose supporters – to thank: 2/12/99.
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