Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

This fight is for everything.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

This really is a full service blog.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

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Burkean alarm bells

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This is why I hate conservatives, especially the ones who pretend to be intellectuals:

The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy.

Where were those Burkean alarm bells when we set out to remake Iraq? (And no, this doesn’t count.) Why do they only go off when a Democratic president attempts much-needed domestic reforms and not when a Republican president forms a Holy Alliance to create democracy in the Middle East?

No amount of masturbating about Burke and Oakeshott and the rest of your little heroes is going to change the fact that the ideology you supported has harmed this country, perhaps irreparably. Maybe it’s time to leave those books (that you probably don’t understand) behind and start reading budget reports and health care plans. That goes for Sully (whose blog I do genuinely like) too. Give it up.

There’s an episode “Cheers” where Diane describes something she’s written as “Joycean”. Carla says “if Joycean means stupid, then I agree.” That’s how I feel when I hear conservatives prattling on about “Burkean” this and “Oakeshottian” that and the importance of “intellectual integrity”. You guys aren’t intellectuals and you have no integrity.

In the end, I don’t think it’s likely that there are many political philosophers of note who would have recommended sending as unaccomplished a man as George Bush to the White House or running four hundred billion dollar deficits during times of economic expansion or persisting with a health care system that costs twice as much per person as any other system and offers worst results. I don’t think that’s likely at all. I think it’s much more likely that people like Brooks (and to a lesser degree Sully) use faux erudition to mask their ignorance of policy details and lack of common sense.

Update: Sully is also mocking Brooks about this, which confirms what the thread already convinced me: that it’s totally unfair to compare him to Brooks.

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Math and the Wall Street Meltdown

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Via memeorandum, a pretty fascinating piece in Wired magazine on the market meltdown:

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li’s formula hadn’t expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system’s foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

David X. Li, it’s safe to say, won’t be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li’s Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

There have been a number of articles about this phenomenon, including this 2004 piece noting that a number of theoretical physicists were heading to Wall Street, and this Washington Post piece from 2007 about the same topic. I distinctly remember another long piece in the Washington post about this, but I can not find it right now.

At any rate, every time I think of the theoretical thinking behind all this, I am reminded of a story one of my old international relations profs told me almost two decades ago about Mike Tyson (I have no way of verifying the quote, as I have looked for it and can never find it. Might be my prof was bs-ing). As the story goes, in an interview with Tyson, a reporter told Tyson that the fighter he was about to face had a strategy for this, and a strategy for that, and a strategy to counter all of Tyson’s strengths, and how did Tyson plan to deal with that. According to my prof, Tyson responded: “They all have their strategies. Then I hit ’em.”

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A Petty Man

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This, from John McCain at the Fiscal Responsibility Summit, was pretty amusing:

MCCAIN: One area I wanted to mention that I think consumed a lot of our conversation on procurement. It was the issue of cost overruns and the Defense Department. We all know how large the defense budget is. We all know that the cost overruns, your helicopter is now going to cost as much as Air Force One. I don’t think that there’s anymore graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost taxpayers enormous amount of money. So the — we will and I know that you’ve already made plans to try to curb some of the excesses in procurement. We really have to do that. We’re going to have to pay for Afghanistan as you well now and we’re not done in Iraq, but most importantly, we have to make some tough decisions, you, Mr. President have to make some tough decisions, not only about what we procure, but how we procure it…

What a small, petty man. The attempt to blame Obama (“your helicopter”) is just another sign of how these guys are spinning their wheels. President Obama had NOTHING to do with the decisions regarding the helicopter and had nothing to do with the cost overruns, as these were all events and decisions made from well before he assumed office. From May 17th, 2007:

Lockheed Martin is projected to overspend by 34 percent on the development contract for the new presidential helicopter, according to Pentagon and Navy officials.

Costs for system design and construction of initial helicopters needed by October 2009 and more capable choppers for 2015 are estimated to total at least $2.4 billion, up from the $1.79 billion job Lockheed Martin won in January 2005, according to the Navy and the Defense Contract Management Agency.

Putting aside the fact that the President and Congress are already working on legislation to address cost overruns, on May 17th, 2007, Barack Obama was not even the party nominee, let alone President.

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At Least This Time They Aren’t Calling It The War of Northern Aggression

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Fun times in wingnuttia:

State governors — looking down the gun barrel of long-term spending forced on them by the Obama “stimulus” plan — are saying they will refuse to take the money. This is a Constitutional confrontation between the federal government and the states unlike any in our time.

In the first five weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has acted so rashly that at least 11 states have decided that his brand of “hope” equates to an intolerable expansion of the federal government’s authority over the states. These states — “Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California…Georgia,” South Carolina, and Texas — “have all introduced bills and resolutions” reminding Obama that the 10th Amendment protects the rights of the states, which are the rights of the people, by limting the power of the federal government. These resolutions call on Obama to “cease and desist” from his reckless government expansion and also indicate that federal laws and regulations implemented in violation of the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states.

So this is what it was like during the Clinton years? I can honestly say, I remember it differently, being on the “other” side back then, but right now these folks are just looking batshit insane.

God help us if Obama ever lies about a blow job.

Bonus thought: Can you imagine what kind of “insurgency” these guys would be running if they had lost in 2008 the way the Democrats did in 2000? Here, they flat out got kicked out of office, rejected by large majorities, and they have decided the solution is to get their freak on.

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Fluffing the whip

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Jay Newton-Small in Time on Eric Cantor:

In offering constructive criticism and viable alternatives, negotiating when possible and walking away when necessary, Cantor believes he’s found the path back to that office with the spectacular view of the Mall.

There’s this too:

The key in opposing the stimulus, Cantor says, was offering a credible alternative. “Our members in the House really rallied around a forward-looking, smarter, simpler stimulus plan,” Cantor says. “We took a very positive, constructive view on where the stimulus should be, and when the bill that rolled through the House missed the mark the way it did, it demonstrated that the thought behind the majority’s bill was not to be a stimulus bill; it was to be a spending bill. And going forward, we’ll be using that as a model.”

I realize that here she’s just quoting Cantor, but at what points do you begin to challenge outright lies? I know the answer for many national reporters today is “never”.

Update: Balloon-Juicer sgwhiteinfla is all over this right at the source.

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Rumors of Republican stimulus victory were greatly exaggerated

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Obviously, no one could have predicted that the Republicans’ heroic battle against the stimulus package would hurt them politically. But here’s Charlie Cook:

As polling very clearly shows, congressional Republicans have done nothing to help themselves by almost unanimously opposing the massive stimulus package. Indeed, they look increasingly isolated: a narrow party that is looking inward for sustenance.

And not many voters want the GOP to be back in the saddle again:

Head-to-head, though, Americans are putting far more faith in Obama than in congressional Republicans: 61 percent said they trust Obama more than the GOP when it comes to economic matters, just 26 percent side with the Republicans in Congress. Obama’s advantage on that question is bigger than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or George H.W. Bush ever had over the opposition party in the legislature on dealing with the economy.

Overall, Democrats maintain a nearly 2 to 1 edge over Republicans as the party Americans prefer to confront “the big issues” over the next few years.

I’m sure the pundits will continue to cite some Rasmussen results that show what a genius Eric Cantor is, though.

I hate to keep beating this one, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the gap between Villager opinion and public opinion this wide. Not since the Clinton impeachment anyway.

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Please Stop Emailing Me

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I have now received five emails to this Sullivan piece:

Now we see the real struggle for the soul of this administration. Obama wants to tackle the insolvency of the big three entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. These three programs, especially Medicare, will destroy the fiscal future, unless we pare them back now. Left untouched, they will also make it much likelier in the near future that global financial markets may finally snap and stop sending money to a country that looks more and more like those subprime mortgage-owners than a serious polity.

A few thoughts. First, I don’t think there is any disagreement anywhere that there is a problem with medicare and medicaid. Second, I simply can not take seriously anyone who worries about Social Security going insolvent in thirty years when there is a solid chance our currency will not make it to 2010. Third, the reason social security is such a hot-button issue is because we have been looting it for decades.

There. I have addressed this. Only a fool can not see the writing on the wall- we are going to have to move to single-payer at some point, because businesses can not compete and the largest problem for Detroit is… their health care obligations and other retiree benefits. Likewise, we spend an enormous amount of our GDP on health care yet have rankings that look third world on issues like infant mortality. Something has to give.

And before the morons start saying I have switched positions on this, I haven’t done anything of the sort. My consistent position the last few years has been that this is sort of inevitable, and whether I want this to happen or not is irrelevant. It will happen. I had sort of felt things were moving this way, and as we all know, our Captains of Industry at Wal-Mart are pretty ok with pushing off the cost of the health care of their employees onto the public. When United Airlines managed to just say to hell with a couple hundred thousand employees and say to hell with their pensions and healthcare in 2005, it sort of became glaringly obvious to me what big business thought the future held for us. Just today a story out of Detroit that Ford is, under an agreement, allowed to substitute their stock for payments to a retiree health care trust. Showing no sense of irony, the other headline at the NY Times is Stocks Slump on Corporate Woes; Indexes Fall by 3.4%. Any of you junior Nostradamus’ want to take a stab at what is going to happen to the retirees covered under that plan? I know what my guess is.

The only thing that is not settled, as far as I can tell, is how much damage we will do moving to the system. It will be a joy to behold, especially listening to folks with lifetime sinecures at prestigious organizations with lucrative health benefits or politicians with government provided health care yelling socialism until their last gasp, but it will happen. Again, the only real question is will we be able to summon up our American ingenuity and in our Solomonic wisdom make a single-payer system that tries to adopt the best of both worlds, does neither, yet still manages to make the members of the gilded class even richer and leaves us with the worst health care system in the industrial and post-industrial world.

The last few years has left me convinced we are up to that challenge. And stop emailing me nonsense.

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