Should we adopt the Swedish model? Sounds dirty somehow.

Foseti unlike certain others can’t think of any opinions that should disqualify someone from being employed by a willing employer.

Why a QE exit isn’t scary.

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.

Evil Obamacare rejectionists are trying to spike the law by pointing out what it actually says.

Some kind of prime number breakthrough.

Matt Welch on the stupid Youtube-video cover story: “Who cares if we have slandered a Cerritos resident by mischaracterizing his crappy art as “incitement” then followed that up with two weeks of partial blaming; we’re trying to manage an interagency turf war over here!” Indeed.

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.

The IRS scandal is not about the President.

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?

Juan Cole thinks Benghazi and the Youtube video was a Republican plot to make Obama look like Jimmy Carter. ‘Make’? Anyway, do read it. Comedy gold.

Art Carden smacks down ‘Pigovian tax’ reasoning: “we can’t make policy designed to fix externalities without taking all the relevant externalities into consideration”. Thank you. All large calculations are wrong.

Conor Friedersdorf points out that President Obama has indeed broken the law, a lot, in a piece that deserves widespread publicity.

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?’

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.

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.

Do we have a deal?

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.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to hear from the author(s) of what is clearly meant to be a central clearinghouse of advancing the Open Borders discussion in a dignified and productive way what their thoughts are regarding the fact that so many open-borders advocates so often seem to feel the need to paint a patently misleading, disingenuous, and obviously-false picture of the situation most illegal immigrants are in purely for spin/debate purposes.

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.

“They should’ve gone after all 501(c)4s.”

“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.

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.

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.

Kevin Drum

Steve Benen

Greg Sargent

And, I’m sure there’s more.

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.

UPDATE:

Ezra Klein