10.15.2009
10.05.2009
Cut Republicans out of healthcare!
Salon Magazine's Garrison Keillor writes: "Cut Republicans out of healthcare! Lett them make do with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Meanwhile, the money we save will pay off the deficit"
...Up here in the North we believe that adversity is a stimulus of intelligence, so we don't want our kids stuck in the slow track in school, putzing around in the shallows, trapped in boredom and lazy thinking. We want the schools to push them, make them write whole sentences and paragraphs, grapple with calculus, learn about the Renaissance, and all the more so if they're bound to become truck drivers. What is so disheartening about politics is the putzing around in the shallows. The sheer waste of time -- years, decades, spent on thrilling public issues in which the unconservative right fights tooth-and-nail against the regressive left and nothing is gained. It's like a tug-of-war between two trees...
The so-called cultural wars over abortion and prayer in the schools and pornography and gays, most of it instigated by shrieking ninnies and pompous blowhards, did nothing about anything, except elect dullards to office who brought a certain nihilistic approach to governance that helped bring about the disaster in the banking industry that ate up a lot of 401Ks, and all thanks to high-fliers in shirts like cheap wallpaper who never learned enough to let it discourage them from believing that they had magical powers over the laws of economics and could hand out mortgages by the fistful to people with no assets and somehow the sun would come out tomorrow. The anti-regulation conservatives enabled those people. We're still waiting for an apology.
Conservatives and liberals can agree on the basics -- that the nation wallows in debt, that it is shortsighted of the states to cut back on the most essential work of government, which is the education of the young, and that somehow we have got to become a more productive nation and less consumptive -- but the ruffles and flourishes of Washington seem ever more irrelevant to the crises we face. When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn't be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the healthcare system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off healthcare to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.
It's time to dump the dead-end issues that have wasted too much time already. Old men shouldn't be allowed to doze off at the switch and muck up the works for the young who will have to repair the damage. Get over yourselves. Your replacements have arrived, and you should think about them now and then. Enough with the shrieking. Pass healthcare reform.
source: Salon Magazine, by Garrison Keillor.
...Up here in the North we believe that adversity is a stimulus of intelligence, so we don't want our kids stuck in the slow track in school, putzing around in the shallows, trapped in boredom and lazy thinking. We want the schools to push them, make them write whole sentences and paragraphs, grapple with calculus, learn about the Renaissance, and all the more so if they're bound to become truck drivers. What is so disheartening about politics is the putzing around in the shallows. The sheer waste of time -- years, decades, spent on thrilling public issues in which the unconservative right fights tooth-and-nail against the regressive left and nothing is gained. It's like a tug-of-war between two trees...The so-called cultural wars over abortion and prayer in the schools and pornography and gays, most of it instigated by shrieking ninnies and pompous blowhards, did nothing about anything, except elect dullards to office who brought a certain nihilistic approach to governance that helped bring about the disaster in the banking industry that ate up a lot of 401Ks, and all thanks to high-fliers in shirts like cheap wallpaper who never learned enough to let it discourage them from believing that they had magical powers over the laws of economics and could hand out mortgages by the fistful to people with no assets and somehow the sun would come out tomorrow. The anti-regulation conservatives enabled those people. We're still waiting for an apology.
Conservatives and liberals can agree on the basics -- that the nation wallows in debt, that it is shortsighted of the states to cut back on the most essential work of government, which is the education of the young, and that somehow we have got to become a more productive nation and less consumptive -- but the ruffles and flourishes of Washington seem ever more irrelevant to the crises we face. When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn't be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the healthcare system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off healthcare to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.
It's time to dump the dead-end issues that have wasted too much time already. Old men shouldn't be allowed to doze off at the switch and muck up the works for the young who will have to repair the damage. Get over yourselves. Your replacements have arrived, and you should think about them now and then. Enough with the shrieking. Pass healthcare reform.
source: Salon Magazine, by Garrison Keillor.
10.01.2009
Stop Before the President Gets Hurt
by Thomas Friedman, New York Times:
I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.
I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.
And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.
Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.
What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.
Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.
Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.
Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.
And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.
Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.
The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.
I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.
We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.
And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.
Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.
What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.
Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.
Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.
Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.
And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.
Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.
The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.
I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.
We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.
Economists for an Imaginary World
From the Washington Post, "Economists for an Imaginary World":
By Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, 30September2 009
"The worldly philosophers" was economist Robert Heilbroner's term for such great economic thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Today's free-market economists, by contrast, aren't merely not philosophers. They're not even worldly.
Has any group of professionals ever been so spectacularly wrong? Pre-Copernican astronomers and cosmologists, I suppose, and for the same reason, really: They had an entire, internally consistent, theoretically rich system that described the universe. They were wrong -- the sun and other celestial bodies save the moon didn't actually revolve around the Earth, as they insisted -- but no matter. It was a thing of beauty, their cosmic order. A vast faith was sustained in part by their pseudo-science, a faith from which such free thinkers as Galileo deviated at their own risk.
As it was with the pre- (or anti-) Copernicans, so it is with today's mainstream economists. Theirs is an elegant system, a thing of beauty in itself, as the New York Times' Paul Krugman has argued. It just fails to jell with reality. And unlike the pre-Copernicans, whose dogma posed a threat to those who challenged it but not, at least directly, to anyone else, their latter-day equivalents in the economic profession pose a clear and present danger to the well-being of damned near everyone.
The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago, is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything. Out of this belief arose the banks' practice of securitization, which put a value on all manner of mortgages and enabled buyers to purchase and swap them with the certainty that such transactions reflected an accurate judgment of the value of the properties and the risks associated with them.
Except, they didn't. So long as economists insisted that they did, however, there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn't exist.
The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes. Every major nation, no matter its economic or political system, has followed Keynes's prescription for combating a major downturn: increasing public spending to fill the gap created by the decline of private spending. That is why the world economy seems to be inching back from collapse and why the nations that have spent the most, China in particular, seem to be recovering fastest.
But Keynes's vision has yet to reestablish itself among economists, who, like the Catholic Church in Galileo's time, aren't about to change their cosmology just because the facts demonstrate that they happen to be wrong. The quants at the banking houses say that they simply failed to sufficiently factor some risks into their mathematical models. Once they do, their system will be corrected, and banks can resume their campaign to securitize everything (as some banks are already doing by establishing a secondary market in life insurance policies).
The problem with that, Robert Skidelsky argues in a new book on economics after the fall, "Keynes: The Return of the Master," is that it neglects one of Keynes's central insights -- that an uncertainty attends human affairs that transcends quantifiable risk. (Skidelsky is also the author of a magisterial three-volume biography of Keynes.) Psychology affects value as much as rational calculation does. Thus the state must ensure against periodic madness in the markets with regulations and social insurance, because madness is a potential threat in markets just as it is in other human endeavors -- because the market is a human endeavor, not reducible to a mathematical construct.
Will contemporary economists ever accept this last precept? In the 1970s, a wry economist named Robert Lekachman observed that economics students had to master so much mathematics that they became emotionally invested in the idea that the math they had learned explained -- had to explain -- the universe. Skidelsky calls for combining the postgraduate course in macroeconomics with another discipline -- history or psychology, say -- to expose young quants to the complexities of human institutions.
If mainstream economics doesn't change, however, it may eventually face the worst of all possible fates: market failure. How many students want to spend their lives quantifying a world that doesn't exist?
Has any group of professionals ever been so spectacularly wrong? Pre-Copernican astronomers and cosmologists, I suppose, and for the same reason, really: They had an entire, internally consistent, theoretically rich system that described the universe. They were wrong -- the sun and other celestial bodies save the moon didn't actually revolve around the Earth, as they insisted -- but no matter. It was a thing of beauty, their cosmic order. A vast faith was sustained in part by their pseudo-science, a faith from which such free thinkers as Galileo deviated at their own risk.
As it was with the pre- (or anti-) Copernicans, so it is with today's mainstream economists. Theirs is an elegant system, a thing of beauty in itself, as the New York Times' Paul Krugman has argued. It just fails to jell with reality. And unlike the pre-Copernicans, whose dogma posed a threat to those who challenged it but not, at least directly, to anyone else, their latter-day equivalents in the economic profession pose a clear and present danger to the well-being of damned near everyone.
The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago, is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything. Out of this belief arose the banks' practice of securitization, which put a value on all manner of mortgages and enabled buyers to purchase and swap them with the certainty that such transactions reflected an accurate judgment of the value of the properties and the risks associated with them.
Except, they didn't. So long as economists insisted that they did, however, there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn't exist.
The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes. Every major nation, no matter its economic or political system, has followed Keynes's prescription for combating a major downturn: increasing public spending to fill the gap created by the decline of private spending. That is why the world economy seems to be inching back from collapse and why the nations that have spent the most, China in particular, seem to be recovering fastest.
But Keynes's vision has yet to reestablish itself among economists, who, like the Catholic Church in Galileo's time, aren't about to change their cosmology just because the facts demonstrate that they happen to be wrong. The quants at the banking houses say that they simply failed to sufficiently factor some risks into their mathematical models. Once they do, their system will be corrected, and banks can resume their campaign to securitize everything (as some banks are already doing by establishing a secondary market in life insurance policies).The problem with that, Robert Skidelsky argues in a new book on economics after the fall, "Keynes: The Return of the Master," is that it neglects one of Keynes's central insights -- that an uncertainty attends human affairs that transcends quantifiable risk. (Skidelsky is also the author of a magisterial three-volume biography of Keynes.) Psychology affects value as much as rational calculation does. Thus the state must ensure against periodic madness in the markets with regulations and social insurance, because madness is a potential threat in markets just as it is in other human endeavors -- because the market is a human endeavor, not reducible to a mathematical construct.
Will contemporary economists ever accept this last precept? In the 1970s, a wry economist named Robert Lekachman observed that economics students had to master so much mathematics that they became emotionally invested in the idea that the math they had learned explained -- had to explain -- the universe. Skidelsky calls for combining the postgraduate course in macroeconomics with another discipline -- history or psychology, say -- to expose young quants to the complexities of human institutions.
If mainstream economics doesn't change, however, it may eventually face the worst of all possible fates: market failure. How many students want to spend their lives quantifying a world that doesn't exist?
By Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, 30September2 009
9.20.2009
9.14.2009
Congratulations Taylor Swift, You're A Star
A cruel irony played itself out at the Video Music Awards last night. Kayne West self destructed underneath the klieg lights, on center stage in front of an audience of his musical peers, filmed on a live television. He stormed the stage to eclipse the spotlight of Taylor Swift. As he oafishly snatched the microphone from Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech for the MTV's "Best Female Video" award, he ironically launched her musical career into the stratosphere.
Although Taylor Swift seem rightfully shocked and dismayed, her agent couldn't have paid for this level of free publicity. Ironically, Kayne West unintentionally birthed a new star. As the days unfold, Taylor Swift will garner headlines from across the globe. Likewise, her videos will be in heavy rotation, and her record sales will soar. I'll even bet that Taylor Swift will vie for the newest MTV “it girl" replacing icons like Madonna, Brittany Spears and Hanna Montana. Taylor Swift should send a thank-you note to the one person who was able to shatter the fame noise barriers, Mr. Kayne West.
Although Taylor Swift seem rightfully shocked and dismayed, her agent couldn't have paid for this level of free publicity. Ironically, Kayne West unintentionally birthed a new star. As the days unfold, Taylor Swift will garner headlines from across the globe. Likewise, her videos will be in heavy rotation, and her record sales will soar. I'll even bet that Taylor Swift will vie for the newest MTV “it girl" replacing icons like Madonna, Brittany Spears and Hanna Montana. Taylor Swift should send a thank-you note to the one person who was able to shatter the fame noise barriers, Mr. Kayne West.
As Alanis Morissette sang “Isn't it ironic... don't you think.”
Of course the situational irony doesn't end with Kayne's outburst. Near the end of the program, Beyoncé (the damsel in distress that caused Kayne West to jump on stage to defend her video honor), graciously offered Taylor Swift her spotlight to finish the acceptance speech.
Within the next few weeks Taylor Swift will certainly gain on the Billboard charts as Kayne's sales will diminish. Next year as Taylor Swift receives her Grammy Awards, MTV Awards, American Music Awards and the Country Music Awards Ms. Swift should give a special shout out to the guy that got booed off the stage and became the pariah of Radio City Music Hall, Kayne West. After all Kayne to extinguish his own career while inadvertently igniting the career of Taylor Swift.
8.20.2009
INFANT MORTALITY RATE -- 2005
State Rankings -- Statistical Abstract of the United States
INFANT MORTALITY RATE -- 2005
- Mississippi (11.4) -- Gov. Haley Barbour (R)
- Louisiana (10.1) -- Gov. Bobby Jindal (R)
- South Carolina (9.4) --Gov. Mark Sanford (R)
- Alabama (9.4) -- Gov. Robert Riley (R)
- Delaware (9) -- Gov. Ruth Ann Minner (D)
- Tennessee (8.9) -- Gov. Phil Bredesen (D)
- North Carolina (8.8) -- Gov. Mike F. Easley (D)
- Ohio (8.3) --Gov. Ted Strickland (D)
- Georgia (8.2) --Gov. Sonny Perdue (R)
- West Virginia (8.1) --Joe Manchin III (D)
- Oklahoma (8.1) -- Gov. Brad Henry (D)
- Indiana (8) --Gov. Mitch Daniels (R)
- Michigan (7.9) -- Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D)
- Arkansas (7.9) -- Gov. Mike Beebe (D)
- Missouri (7.5)-- Gov. Matt Blunt (R)
- Virginia (7.5) -- Gov. Tim Kaine (D)
8.19.2009
Guns at Obama Rallies: Where's the Outrage?
It was surprising the first time it happened. Last week, Secret Service officials discovered a man carrying a concealed semiautomatic weapon at a town-hall meeting hosted by President Obama. "How could that happen?" was the question that followed, at one point from the lips of Chris Matthews, who scolded the flippant offender in a nationally televised interview. The whole episode would be worthy of a nervous head shake if it was the only instance. But over the weekend, a different protester attended an Obama rally in Arizona, this time with an assault rifle in plain view over his shoulder. What followed─a few wire stories and some Web video─was the equivalent of a truncated, national yawn. The reasoning that quelled any spark of alarm or display of concern, was that technically, it's legal. In a state like Arizona (and more than a dozen others) carrying a weapon is perfectly permissible. Our hands are tied, said local police, who had the arduous duty of explaining to reasonably alarmed demonstrators that no laws had actually been broken.
Indeed, it's hard to argue, or even keep track of, variations in states' gun-ownership laws. But the vitrol at play outside of Obama's events (and at congressional town halls) shines light on something far deeper than a debate over gun rights or a public option. The disturbing truth is that multiple people have unrepentantly brought loaded guns within a few hundred yards of the president of the United States.
It's the furthest thing from amusing to talk, even hypothetically, about the assassination of the U.S. head of state, let alone act on it. In 2006, a New York state official (who was a Democrat) joked stupidly that one of his colleague should "put a bullet between the president's eyes," referring to President Bush. Within hours, he profusely apologized, and not long after that, Republicans were calling for his resignation. It was a reasonable reaction to the suggestion that a sitting president be fatally removed from office. But when someone goes through actual motions─bringing a loaded gun within range of the president─the national reaction seems far more tepid.
At its core, the innuendo extends beyond partisanship or ideology. It's a dangerous path to embark to consider the president's life a referendum on his policies. Rather, it's an attack on a democratically elected leader who represents America's freedom and style of government to the rest of the world. It's easy to consider those who threaten his life as anomalistic crazies. But a collective lack of outrage ensures they'll only grow in number.
Indeed, it's hard to argue, or even keep track of, variations in states' gun-ownership laws. But the vitrol at play outside of Obama's events (and at congressional town halls) shines light on something far deeper than a debate over gun rights or a public option. The disturbing truth is that multiple people have unrepentantly brought loaded guns within a few hundred yards of the president of the United States.
It's the furthest thing from amusing to talk, even hypothetically, about the assassination of the U.S. head of state, let alone act on it. In 2006, a New York state official (who was a Democrat) joked stupidly that one of his colleague should "put a bullet between the president's eyes," referring to President Bush. Within hours, he profusely apologized, and not long after that, Republicans were calling for his resignation. It was a reasonable reaction to the suggestion that a sitting president be fatally removed from office. But when someone goes through actual motions─bringing a loaded gun within range of the president─the national reaction seems far more tepid.
At its core, the innuendo extends beyond partisanship or ideology. It's a dangerous path to embark to consider the president's life a referendum on his policies. Rather, it's an attack on a democratically elected leader who represents America's freedom and style of government to the rest of the world. It's easy to consider those who threaten his life as anomalistic crazies. But a collective lack of outrage ensures they'll only grow in number.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
8.18.2009
8.16.2009
Financial crisis - Silly Money
Financial crisis - Silly Money (Part1)
Financial crisis - Silly Money (Part2)
Financial crisis - Silly Money (Part2)
8.15.2009
Dan Ariely
Professor Dan Ariely visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. This event took place on July 1, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.
Gall Street
From the Wall Street Journal: "Unfinished Business for Wall Street's 'Death Panel'" by David Weidner
Wall Street is dead. Long live Wall Street.In the next few weeks the media will begin recounting the great implosion of a year ago. We will watch, read and hear again how an economic "death panel" led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson denied aid to flawed firms such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. while companies such as American International Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. were kept alive through extraordinary means.
Many of the postmortems will take as a given the idea that Wall Street has somehow changed. Many will argue that it's a less risky place today, more regulated and humbled. Firms are bracing for the raft of rules coming from Washington. Investment banks must now behave like doddering commercial banks. A dozen CEOs and thousands of employees have been shown the exits.
We will be told, as we have been, that Wall Street as we know it ended in September 2008.
Were it true, we might be on onto something like a new financial system that holds risk takers -- not the ordinary Americans who have been battered by decimated housing values, retirement accounts and lost jobs -- accountable for their mistakes.
In retrospect, the great upheaval of last fall may not have been severe enough.
Casino Ethos
Recent evidence suggests not only has Wall Street survived, but it is essentially unchanged. The casino ethos is alive and well in the record value-at-risk numbers at some firms and the hand-wringing at rivals that temporarily short-leashed trading desks and suffered lower profits as a result. Bonuses are rising and banks are hiring again to capture gains in the volatile commodities and other speculation-fueled markets.
There is plenty of empirical and statistical evidence, but it only reflects the root of the problem: Wall Street's rising resentment toward critics and its unabashed defense of greed over safety.
Back in the salad days before the financial meltdown, when credit was cheap and profit growth defied gravity, the biggest issue facing Wall Street was the high cost of complying with regulations. The cause was taken up by such champions as the then-head of the New York Stock Exchange, John Thain, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and the industry itself through its lobbying arm, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.
SIFMA, which helped eliminate NYSE's regulation of some firms and brokers, is railing against regulations again. This time, the association is protesting surprise audits proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC has proposed the audits as a way to combat potential Ponzi schemes such as the one run by Bernie Madoff. SIFMA claims the audits could cost some firms up to $282,800.
But it's not just SIFMA. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., has articulated Wall Street's resentment for the aid given by taxpayers and Washington by complaining about the government's heavy-handed approach.
Mr. Dimon, who claims his bank never needed the $25 billion it returned to the government in June, seems to have forgotten the government's aid to his firm in the purchase of Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual Inc. last year, not to mention its aid to the banking industry in the crisis, which certainly would have leveled J.P. Morgan had the government not stepped in and backed Wall Street with the nation's credit.
Selective Amnesia
Mr. Dimon's criticism seems to have emboldened more, shrill voices such as Richard Bove, the bank industry analyst at Rochdale Securities, who apparently slept through the past 18 months based on how he began his Aug. 6 research note.
"There is a movement in this country to fine, tax, and regulate success in the financial industry," Mr. Bove wrote. "I do not like it."
Arguing bailout cash "was borrowed in the open market and not taken from taxpayer funds" and that "the industry may have been able to handle its problems" had the government not stepped in, Mr. Bove, who speaks for many on Wall Street, seems to believe the bailout didn't carry the baggage of moral hazard that many believe will encourage firms to take risk. In addition, he argues fines, taxes and regulation curtail our financial competitiveness overseas.
Many would argue that fines punish wrongdoers, taxes pay for investor protections and regulation keeps our markets safe and functioning, giving us a competitive advantage -- the reputation for fair and open markets.
Mr. Bove's brand of backlash isn't the only signal that Wall Street is trucking along with selective amnesia. The controversial practice of high-frequency trading and the rabid defense of its practitioners is a threat to investors' fragile trust in fair markets. Banks continue to move slowly in recognizing and shedding problem assets -- again hoping the problems will just go away just as the CEOs of Lehman and AIG hoped during the summer of 2008.
If it feels like déjà vu all over again, it's because nothing has really changed. The thing about the government-run death panel is not that it put some of these firms out of their misery, it's that it let those carrying the disease live. (source Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street is dead. Long live Wall Street.In the next few weeks the media will begin recounting the great implosion of a year ago. We will watch, read and hear again how an economic "death panel" led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson denied aid to flawed firms such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. while companies such as American International Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. were kept alive through extraordinary means.
Many of the postmortems will take as a given the idea that Wall Street has somehow changed. Many will argue that it's a less risky place today, more regulated and humbled. Firms are bracing for the raft of rules coming from Washington. Investment banks must now behave like doddering commercial banks. A dozen CEOs and thousands of employees have been shown the exits.We will be told, as we have been, that Wall Street as we know it ended in September 2008.
Were it true, we might be on onto something like a new financial system that holds risk takers -- not the ordinary Americans who have been battered by decimated housing values, retirement accounts and lost jobs -- accountable for their mistakes.In retrospect, the great upheaval of last fall may not have been severe enough.
Casino Ethos
Recent evidence suggests not only has Wall Street survived, but it is essentially unchanged. The casino ethos is alive and well in the record value-at-risk numbers at some firms and the hand-wringing at rivals that temporarily short-leashed trading desks and suffered lower profits as a result. Bonuses are rising and banks are hiring again to capture gains in the volatile commodities and other speculation-fueled markets.There is plenty of empirical and statistical evidence, but it only reflects the root of the problem: Wall Street's rising resentment toward critics and its unabashed defense of greed over safety.
Back in the salad days before the financial meltdown, when credit was cheap and profit growth defied gravity, the biggest issue facing Wall Street was the high cost of complying with regulations. The cause was taken up by such champions as the then-head of the New York Stock Exchange, John Thain, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and the industry itself through its lobbying arm, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.SIFMA, which helped eliminate NYSE's regulation of some firms and brokers, is railing against regulations again. This time, the association is protesting surprise audits proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC has proposed the audits as a way to combat potential Ponzi schemes such as the one run by Bernie Madoff. SIFMA claims the audits could cost some firms up to $282,800.
But it's not just SIFMA. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., has articulated Wall Street's resentment for the aid given by taxpayers and Washington by complaining about the government's heavy-handed approach.
Mr. Dimon, who claims his bank never needed the $25 billion it returned to the government in June, seems to have forgotten the government's aid to his firm in the purchase of Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual Inc. last year, not to mention its aid to the banking industry in the crisis, which certainly would have leveled J.P. Morgan had the government not stepped in and backed Wall Street with the nation's credit.
Selective AmnesiaMr. Dimon's criticism seems to have emboldened more, shrill voices such as Richard Bove, the bank industry analyst at Rochdale Securities, who apparently slept through the past 18 months based on how he began his Aug. 6 research note.
"There is a movement in this country to fine, tax, and regulate success in the financial industry," Mr. Bove wrote. "I do not like it."
Arguing bailout cash "was borrowed in the open market and not taken from taxpayer funds" and that "the industry may have been able to handle its problems" had the government not stepped in, Mr. Bove, who speaks for many on Wall Street, seems to believe the bailout didn't carry the baggage of moral hazard that many believe will encourage firms to take risk. In addition, he argues fines, taxes and regulation curtail our financial competitiveness overseas.
Many would argue that fines punish wrongdoers, taxes pay for investor protections and regulation keeps our markets safe and functioning, giving us a competitive advantage -- the reputation for fair and open markets.
Mr. Bove's brand of backlash isn't the only signal that Wall Street is trucking along with selective amnesia. The controversial practice of high-frequency trading and the rabid defense of its practitioners is a threat to investors' fragile trust in fair markets. Banks continue to move slowly in recognizing and shedding problem assets -- again hoping the problems will just go away just as the CEOs of Lehman and AIG hoped during the summer of 2008.
If it feels like déjà vu all over again, it's because nothing has really changed. The thing about the government-run death panel is not that it put some of these firms out of their misery, it's that it let those carrying the disease live. (source Wall Street Journal)
8.14.2009
GOP's Flying Monkeys Disrupt Town Hall Meetings
"A Price to Pay for the Town Hall Rage": by David Broder
"At the Town Halls, Trivializing Evil": by Michael Gerson
"Gunning for Health Care": by Gail Collins
8.12.2009
Protester at Obama healthcare town hall carried 9mm pistol
William Kostnic wears a 9mm pistol as he stands outside a town hall meeting on health care held by Barack Obama. Photograph: Joel Page/APFrom across the pond at the Guardian in the UK:
The placard read "it is time to water the tree of liberty!" - but it was not a water pistol strapped to the thigh of the protester waiting for Barack Obama, but a real gun.
William Kostnic was waiting near the town hall at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the president was due to address a meeting on his bitterly contentious plans for healthcare reform - but the 9mm pistol in the leg holster strapped outside his jeans was perfectly legal.
In New Hampshire, as police informed an MSNBC television reporter, who duly passed on the news to his stunned anchorman, only carrying a concealed weapon is illegal.
Kostnic's gun could hardly have been less concealed, and he was also standing on private property, in the grounds of a church near the town hall.
Obama, according to a new book, is already receiving more death threats than any other American president, and the demonstrations as he tries to win support for his healthcare reforms are becoming daily more passionate. "One day God is going to stand before you and judge you!" one protester shouted at him earlier this week.
However even in a country where guns are often seen as a man's God-given right, television images of the armed protester shocked many viewers.
"Just to be clear," the baffled MSNBC anchor said to the reporter on the scene. "You're saying a guy has a gun in the open - where we already know there are concerns about every president's safety, but certainly this president ... and the guy's just being allowed to stay there? Is that right?"
The reporter replied that the chief of police had told him: "The law allows this man to be here."
The phrase "time to water the tree of liberty" - a reference to a famous quotation from Thomas Jefferson, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" - is also frequently used by a right wing group called Stormfront , motto White Pride World Wide. (source:
William Kostnic was waiting near the town hall at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the president was due to address a meeting on his bitterly contentious plans for healthcare reform - but the 9mm pistol in the leg holster strapped outside his jeans was perfectly legal.
In New Hampshire, as police informed an MSNBC television reporter, who duly passed on the news to his stunned anchorman, only carrying a concealed weapon is illegal.
Kostnic's gun could hardly have been less concealed, and he was also standing on private property, in the grounds of a church near the town hall.
Obama, according to a new book, is already receiving more death threats than any other American president, and the demonstrations as he tries to win support for his healthcare reforms are becoming daily more passionate. "One day God is going to stand before you and judge you!" one protester shouted at him earlier this week.
However even in a country where guns are often seen as a man's God-given right, television images of the armed protester shocked many viewers.
"Just to be clear," the baffled MSNBC anchor said to the reporter on the scene. "You're saying a guy has a gun in the open - where we already know there are concerns about every president's safety, but certainly this president ... and the guy's just being allowed to stay there? Is that right?"
The reporter replied that the chief of police had told him: "The law allows this man to be here."
The phrase "time to water the tree of liberty" - a reference to a famous quotation from Thomas Jefferson, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" - is also frequently used by a right wing group called Stormfront , motto White Pride World Wide. (source:
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