Political Bloviation

Private equity : The New Yorker.

Maybe not. Hedge fund managers get a massive tax break worth billions because of a tax loophole that allows them to pay only 15% on the great majority of their income. I know I pay a helluva lot higher rate, but then again I’m not a downtrodden hedge fund manager. Despite a fix being passed by the House three times in three years the Senate may not even take it up.Why would this happen when approval of the financial industry is ranked just above convicted pedophiles and lepers?

If we were starting from scratch, after all, it seems unlikely that the Senate would choose this particular moment to pass a bill subsidizing money managers to the tune of billions of dollars a year. But, because the tax break already exists, it exerts a kind of gravitational pull that makes it hard to get rid of. In part, that’s simple economics—those who benefit from the tax break have more money to lobby for it to be kept in place. Furthermore, while the cost of subsidies is spread out among all taxpayers, the benefits are highly concentrated, so, naturally, opposition is generally diluted and diffuse while support is intense. If you work in private equity, it’s possible that nothing the government does matters more than keeping this tax break intact. And this pattern is true not just of subsidies but of government programs in general: every government action creates a constituency with an interest in keeping that action going.

They title might be My wife loves to sing and loves her some American Idol. Therefore I watch American Idol and make fun of it. I think the show is moribund and should die a gruesome death. I hear Simon is leaving. A snarkless  Idol just isn’t worth watching. So here’s my suggestion.

Next year, when they’re doing eliminations and are down to the last two, rather than doing the retarded over-played faux suspense each week, I think with the least votes should fight for the right to continue. UFC and MMA is growing American Idol is not, so why not bring some blood and carnage to pump up the ratings? I can remember more than a few contestants I’d love to see getting some ground and pounded, then choked out (Sanjaya anyone?). Yup I’d pay to see that.

Any resemblance to the iPad is tooootaly intentional.

Glenn Beck and his sponsors deserve mocking:

I thought I was pretty well informed about trade and economics, but I did not know this:

The Americas’ economies are tightly intertwined, to the benefit of all sides. Most U.S. citizens, for example, probably don’t realize that their country exports as much to Latin America as to the entire European Union.

via Adios, Amigos | Foreign Policy.

h/t to Marginal Revolution

Ezra Klein – Reid to McConnell: Reconcile this.

Read it yourself, Reid puts the GOP on notice that they will in fact use reconciliation to complete health care reform. Let the screaming from the right begin, now!

I suppose this means that Harry Reid does in fact have balls.

In case you missed it a few weeks ago:

YouTube – Epic beard man.

67 year old white dude (Beard Man) insults a younger black man (Corn Rows) by asking him how much he would charge to shine his shoes. Admittedly, that could be construed as a racist remark by anyone. Jesus might have tried to pimp slap the guy. After exchanging some words Beard Man moves away to the front of the bus. They continue to insult each other. Corn Rows follows Beard Man to the front presumably to “put my foot up your ass”. At about 1:40 into the video he takes a swing at Beard Man. Using a clean, straight left and right hook combination that would be at home in a UFC fight Beard Man administers a beat down. After some “ground and pound” the fight is over Corn Rows says what sounds like “Bring an amber lamps” (ambulance?) presumably because he’s bleeding profusely through the nose.

The internet responds magnificently with a mash-up.  I caught this on Tosh.0 the other night:

Remember boys and girls, you should never, ever try to put your foot up the ass of a much bigger, somewhat disturbed, racist Vietnam veteran on an BART bus wearing an “I AM A MOTHER FUCKER” tee shirt. You might get your ass kicked and need an “amber lamps”. Then you might get creatively mocked on the internet to the tune of catchy southern rock version of an old Lead Belly song. Here’s your 15 minutes of fame dude, enjoy. You’ve earned it!

PS.  I don’t condone the inherent racism displayed by Beard Man. But Corn Rows did swing first, probably thinking he could beat up an old man. Also, I don’t think the origins of the Song Black Betty are racist. It seems that Black Betty was either slag for a liquor bottle or a flint lock musket.

Here’s a post on a development in an ongoing case brought by a couple of private military contractors who allege imprisonment in a US military facility and torture for blowing the whistle on illegal arms trading inside Iraq by their employer Shield Group Security. It appeared that SGS was selling arms to insurgent groups at a tidy profit:

Sensen No Sen: Puckering Mr. Cheney.

Back in 2006, I wrote a post entitled A Nation of Hypocrites that focused on the case of Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, private military contractors working in Iraq.  The two men uncovered what appeared to be illegal arms dealing by their employer, Shield Group Security, and reported it to outside authorities.

The result? Mr. Ertel and Mr. Vance, a Navy veteran and two-time voter for George W. Bush, were disappeared into a military prison without access to the outside world and without judicial review. Mr. Ertel was released after 6 weeks, but Mr. Vance was held for 97 days.  His family had no idea what had happened to him – his fiance believed he had been killed – and both men allege that they were tortured. It is only because the military deigned to release them – with implied threats that they’d better keep their mouths shut – that they are today free men.

Mr. Ertel and Mr. Vance brought suit against the military and against Bush Administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, focusing on three areas: cruel and inhumane treatment; violation of procedural due process; and denial of access to the courts.  Lawyers for Secretary Rumsfeld filed a motion to dismiss the suit, and on Friday, U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen voided the second and third counts.  More importantly however, Judge Andersen also ruled that the former contractors had alleged enough specifics to warrant a hearing of evidence on the first count of cruel and inhumane treatment.

That last sentence should give both Rumsfeld and Cheney some pause. The defense describes the judges ruling:

Judge Refuses to Dismiss Suit Against Rumsfeld- Blog of Legal Times, Mike Kanovitz

Essentially the judge held that there is a constitutional violation for the types of brutality that are alleged in our complaint, and that someone who is even as high ranking as a Cabinet official can be held liable for that constitutional violation if he authorizes subordinates to commit that type of violence. Furthermore, the court held that even though he is a high placed official, the pleading requirements that apply to any defendant and any plaintiff are the same ones. And even though it requires a high amount of specific evidence for holding him liable, there’s enough evidence in the complaint that he did authorize this type of violence to be sufficient to force him to answer for these actions in a court of law.

Perhaps I am naïve to believe that powerful will ever answer for their crimes in this country. Even when they admit on national television that they “fans of waterboarding” in the context of ordering subordinates to use “enhanced interrogation techniques”** on detainees.

I think that down the road, when our children look at this phase of our history, they’ll see Mr Bush’s “War on Terrah” as a clear violation of America law and values. Something akin to the internment of the Japanese during WWII or Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus during the Civil War. Both of those previous examples involved much greater threats to the existence of this nation. Al-Qaeda, and it’s murderous thugs weren’t then and aren’t now an existential threat to the US. But our reaction to them most definitely is.

Our detainee policies, which sadly seem to be getting institutionalized as standard operating procedure despite empty campaign promises by Obama, have done more to recruit and fund terrorism than just about anything else we could have done. The stated aims of attacking us, was to get a reactionary response from the west that would open the flood gates to help mainstream violent jihad against the west among moderate Muslims. We did exactly what they wanted and  Al-Qaeda blossomed and morphed into the hydra-headed monster it is today.

I had hoped that a constitutional law professor would find some value in defending the Constitution, but Obama has consistently disappointed. He gave lip service to closing Gitmo early on, but has not followed through. Any opposition from right and he backs off. All I’ve seen is timidity and cowardice from him, when it comes to defending the Constitution.

I suppose one could argue that a sitting President would rarely, if ever, agree to voluntarily limit executive power and that is properly the role of the judiciary. Sadly, the federal courts from Supreme Court to the Appellate Courts, the District courts and career DOJ positions have been stacked with  “Good Bushies” who share the Yoo worldview of limitless executive power during times of war. And of course the “War on Terrah” has no end in sight, we’re essentially in a perpetual state of war.

Limitless executive power emanating from endless state of war, coupled with electronic surveillance unencumbered by meaningful judicial review. That sounds just like the optimum conditions for tyranny at the whim of the President. I didn’t trust Bush with that kind of power. I don’t trust Obama, or anyone else I can think of either. It’s not a partisan issue. This is a much greater threat to the underpinnings of American society than anything cave dwelling suicide bombers on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border can do to us.

**The phrase “enhanced interrogation” is rendered in German as “Verschärfte Vernehmung” and was favored by the Gestapo as softer term to cover the torture of resistance fighters and their supporters in German occupied areas. What the Bush administration approved of is identical to tactics used by Nazis and prosecuted during the Nuremburg Trials as war crimes. This is not to say that I think Bush is a Nazi, but that what we as a nation did and continue to ignore was by any reasonable definition torture.” Calling it “enhanced interrogation is much too Orwellian for my liking. It’s disturbing how it converges once you begin to think it’s OK for us to do it because we’re the “good guys”.

Magazine Preview – Building a Better Teacher – NYTimes.com.

A long but worthwhile piece on improving education by improving teachers, rather than worrying about standardized test scores or charter schools or class size:

When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

Seems obvious from my perspective as a bit of through put in the educational system. The difficulty seems that it’s hard to nail down exactly what separates the good from the bad. How would a well intentioned administrator implement a program to improve teachers? We don’t seem to know what to measure.

But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”

I share his curiosity about the subject. Our little one will be 3 this summer. Soon enough she’ll be headed off to a local pre-k program and become grist for mill of public education. Should concerned parents try private or charter education? The local elementary school is well rated, but is that enough?

2010 Walk Now for Autism Speaks: Tampa Bay – General Donation.

I have a very personal connection to this effort. It’s is for my granddaughter Elisabeth and other families living with autism. She’s  and is a very sweet 5 year old little girl who’s still struggling to learn to speak. Please follow the link above and help if you can.

Elisabeth

I hope sometime soon laws are passed that prevent insurance companies from refusing to cover her and from carving out exceptions that offer reduced benefits to children like her. In many cases autism treated as a mental illness and covered with a greatly reduced set of benefits that prevents them from getting useful therapy that can mean the difference between an independent life or permanent dependence on public assistance. It’s just wrong, it’s not like kids with autism are looking for Prozac to “help” them through a bad break-up. Their victims of  a poorly understood condition that’s no fault of their own.

At the same time states and county school districts are cutting or considering cutting programs to help children with developmental difficulties, like Elisabeth. This will rob any chance of a future from autistic children who come from families that aren’t wealthy enough to pay for private schools and therapy on their own.

I have seen the future and it’s SSD.

The more I see an hear about SSD devices, the more I like it. I know I’m going to upgrade to SSD for the OS and swap file partitions, perhaps with a few programs that would benefit from the extra speed. That would require a another drive for access to larger files, primarily audio and video content, most likely in the form of a pair of 500GB drive (in a RAID1 mirror array)  the old home server.  SATA disk drives are really cheap these days. I can remember buying a 20MB (yes that’s megabyte not gigabyte) drive as an upgrade for and IBM XT PC for $300 many years ago. Beat the crap out of running off dual 5.25″ floppy drives. These days with that much coin you could sport a 500GB RAID-5 3 drive array.

I run a Redhat derivative called SME Linux to act as web, file and e-mail server, as well as a firewall at home. It’s got a simplified web admin interface for basic tasks and no Gnome, KDE or other desktop software, but you can always open a terminal and get at the guts of it. It’s purpose in life is to be a LAMP server and it does fine in the role. The old SME box needs some new hardware at some point, particularly memory, as various web crawlers and spiders that index my blog can bring it too its knees. Memory usage seems to be the culprit, along with the bazillion MySQL queries that search engine indexing causes. Bumping up the available RAM and using SSD selectively sounds like a good way of bumping up performance without spending too much. The only reason I care is it causes Wordpress to throw database errors, making the blog unavailable (probably no major loss there) and makes my e-mail bog down to a standstill as well.

Meanwhile, my netbook might just get a 64GB SSD upgrade, to check out how well this may or may not help performance prior to spending the coin on a larger model. I saw some at my favorite retailer newegg.com that sport a lifetime warranty. You gotta like that.

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead.

Bondad at 538 takes on the notion that US manufacturing job are gone (and aren’t’ coming back) because free trade agreements like NAFTA allowed US markets to be flooded with cheap foreign goods. He literally graphs the issues to death.

The main point appears to be that that productivity increases and not a dearth of US manufacturing activity, foreign imports or outsourcing  has been the driver of job loss in manufacturing.  We need fewer workers per volume of goods. He closes with some points about a lack of a US export strategy similar to what’s practiced growing Asian economies, Chinese currency manipulation, and how productivity changes have primarily impacted those lacking a college education.

Update:

You could take the headline one of two ways, either it’s moribund and not coming back: Monty Python: Bring Out Your Dead

or

You could say it’s not dead it’s just resting: Monty Python: Parrot Sketch

Or maybe I just want excuses for posting Monty Python stuff.

The New Yorker points out that despite bitching and moaning to the contrary the Senate Health Care bill is bipartisan:

…the Democrats’ bill more closely resembles Richard Nixon’s health-care proposal—the one that Ted Kennedy went to his grave regretting he hadn’t embraced—than it does Bill Clinton’s, to say nothing of Harry Truman’s. Nor are all its Republican features archeological. “Our bill contains over a hundred and forty-seven distinct Republican amendments,” Senator Tom Harkin, of Iowa, reminded his summit colleagues. The health-care reform bill—which, despite everything, is still alive—is an ambitious piece of legislation, however modest it may be by the measure of the rest of the developed world. Ideologically and substantively, it is centrist. It has Republicans, and Republicanism, in its family tree.

via Bipartisanship and your health : The New Yorker.

The GOP caucus simply wants to block reform by any means necessary. It’s not about the relative merits of reform proposals or who came up with them. It’s not about tens of thousands who die annually because they delay care for a lack of coverage. It’s not even about wild shrill, misused accusations of socialism or fascism. It’s about electoral politics, pure and simple. If they can deny Obama a victory, they feel like they’ll do better in the mid-terms. If thousands more die, well they probably didn’t have the money to contribute to their campaigns anyway.

This was a gem from Krugman, I don’t usually copy an entire post, but this was worth it:

Jonathan Chait and Robert Waldmann, in slightly different ways, highlight a crucial dynamic in American political debate: the extent to which public figures are punished for actually knowing what they’re talking about.

It goes like this: Person A says “Black is white” — perhaps out of ignorance, although more often out of a deliberate effort to obfuscate. Person B says, “No, black isn’t white — here are the facts.”

And Person B is considered to have lost the exchange — you see, he came across as arrogant and condescending.

I had, I have to admit, hoped that the nation’s experience with George W. Bush — who got within hanging-chad distance of the White House precisely because Al Gore was punished for actually knowing stuff — would have cured our discourse of this malady. But no. Why not?

Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)

Inevitably, then, such people react with rage when they’re shown up on their facts or basic logic — it’s an attack on their sense of self-worth.

The truly sad thing, though, is the way much news reporting goes along with the condescension meme. That’s Waldmann’s point. You really, really might have expected that the Bush experience would give reporters pause — that they might at least ask themselves, “Isn’t it my job to ask whether a politician is right, as opposed to how he comes across?”

via Economics and Politics – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.

It’s worth just for the line about Dick Armey, but on a more serious note it does say a lot about our political system. It has to all come back to the educational system. It’s harder to get away with obfuscation when dealing with people capable of critical thinking. Maybe people of good conscience will come to different conclusions as to the best course, but hopefully they have the internal resources to sort out obvious (if pleasant sounding) bullshit. It does seem the American people are addicted to truthiness

Are there no limits of civilized behavior that’s not subject to be waived away by legal sophistry?

At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, that the president’s wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:

“What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally—”

“Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.”

“To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again.

“Sure,” said Yoo.

via Report: Bush Lawyer Said President Could Order Civilians to Be ‘Massacred’ – Declassified Blog – Newsweek.com.

Apparently not. No limits on barbarity and no moral bright lines these people would not cross.

Krugman, on the shear incoherence and cowardice of the GOP’s so-called  small government activists:

…ever since Reagan, the G.O.P. has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

…But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Bankruptcy Boys – NYTimes.com.

Anyone with an interest in what’s wrong with the Senate should read the whole thing. Here’s what’s wrong in one paragraph.

most strident partisans must learn to occasionally sacrifice short-term tactical political advantage for the sake of the nation. Otherwise, Congress will remain stuck in an endless cycle of recrimination and revenge. The minority seeks to frustrate the majority, and when the majority is displaced it returns the favor. Power is constantly sought through the use of means which render its effective use, once acquired, impossible.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Why I’m Leaving the Senate – NYTimes.com.

The GOP preaches small government when out of power, while massively expanding it when actually in power. Their policy of don’t tax and spend is directly related to the looming fiscal crisis that threatens to push the federal government down the same road as California and Greece. What they actually do while in power is diametrically opposed to the goals of actual libertarians that make up Ron Paul supporters and many Tea Partiers, except when they need libertarians to win an election.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon, nail is it:

This is what Republicans always do. When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm. Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket. The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State. Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their “small government principles.” The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton’s Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers. The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted — both before they were empowered and again now — that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint.

What makes this deceit particularly urgent for them now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement — the tea partiers — that has been (largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP’s actual approach to governing.  This is a huge wedge waiting to be exposed — to explode — as the modern GOP establishment and the actual ”small-government” libertarians that fuel the tea party are fundamentally incompatible.  Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they’re eager that the sham will be maintained:  the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles.  The only evidence of a passionate movement urging GOP resurgence is from people whose views are antithetical to that Party.

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

John Birch Society at CPAC | Talking Points Memo.

CPAC welcomes everyone’s favorite old time racists. They’re faithful followers of Brother John Birch…

(Apologies to Charlie Daniels for paraphrasing “Uneasy Rider“)

Seth MacFarlane, on last nights Real Time with Bill Maher, says: “If Ronald Regan was President, he’d try Dick Cheney for war crimes.” This was in response to Bill asking if anyone has seen Dick Cheney brag about personally ordering water boarding on the Sunday talk shows. The assertion is, I assume, based on Reagan signing the UN Treaty Against Torture.

So how might so-called conservatives who defend torture by our government respond to that kind of cognitive dissonance? Reagan worship on one hand, and mindless support of barbarism on the other. Oh how can they possibly choose?