Even the liberal NPR (via).
I don’t claim to be any kind of an expert on climate change but shouldn’t the report be more aimed at accuracy than at making people feel good?
by DougJ| 125 Comments
This post is in: Even the "Liberal" New Republic, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?
Even the liberal NPR (via).
I don’t claim to be any kind of an expert on climate change but shouldn’t the report be more aimed at accuracy than at making people feel good?
by $8 blue check mistermix| 132 Comments
This post is in: Even the "Liberal" New Republic
Leon Wieseltier explains to us all how Nate Silver is the wrong kind of person, not serious, can’t feel the right kind of feels, and is the kind of lowlife who would piss in a bidet and eat his salad with his fish fork:
Silver, by contrast, has chosen a fox’s snout for the logo of his new site for “data journalism, capital D.” He knows many things. He has no priors. He thinks only originally. He never repeats himself. Never mind that the ancient poet’s line was most likely preferring the hedgehog to the fox, and praising “one big thing.” The fox, a predatory creature, is loose.
I’m sure it just shows my irrational romance with facts, but that’s not a fucking snout. It’s a fox’s face. As for the rest of the piece, if you can find one genuine argument in all that throat clearing, straw men and ad hominem, please let me know.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 123 Comments
This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, Even the "Liberal" New Republic, Security Theatre
In addition to what Anne Laurie posted earlier today, I thought this quote from the Post story on the report of the independent review board examining NSA surveillance is worth highlighting:
“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”
Also, for those of you who were quoting that Wilentz piece in the New Republic in the last open thread, I thought you might be interested in Henry Farrell’s takedown, which is pretty complete. Here’s a taste:
Long time readers of Sean Wilentz will remember him for greatest hits like his notorious piece on the “cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama’s supposedly uplifting campaign,” involving “the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states’ rights,” or his claim that not only was Obama’s “most obvious change to liberal politics” the color of his skin, but Obama was the second coming of Jimmy Carter and a starry-eyed Russia-hugger to boot. So it’s very, very weird to see Wilentz criticizing Edward Snowden on the grounds that his “disgruntlement with Obama … was fueled by a deep disdain for progressive politics” – given his own track record on Obama’s brand of progressivism, why on earth would he believe this to be a problem?
But then the whole article – an attempted hack job on Snowden, Greenwald, Assange and the liberals who like them – is weird like that. In one sense, I can understand why the New Republic went for it – it’s perhaps the purest exercise in even~the~liberal~New Republic~ism that the magazine has published since its change in ownership. Yet it’s also so obviously intellectually shoddy and incoherently argued that you’d have thought that any half-way competent editor would have decided that no amount of contrarianism was worth the damage to the magazine’s brand.
Unlike Wilentz’ hack job, Farrell’s piece is worth reading in full.
Just Close Your Eyes, Cover Your Ears, and Chant “Russian Spy”Post + Comments (123)
by Kay| 56 Comments
This post is in: Education, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Kochsuckers, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), Even the "Liberal" New Republic, Fools! Overton Window!, Nobody could have predicted, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment
Sadly, more than a decade of evidence and facts under both Bush and Obama don’t seem to have “taken the shine off” this “market reform” education model in the US:
When one of the biggest private education firms in Sweden went bankrupt earlier this year, it left 11,000 students in the lurch and made Stockholm rethink its pioneering market reform of the state schools system. School shutdowns and deteriorating results have taken the shine off an education model admired and emulated around the world, in Britain in particular.
“I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality,” said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament’s education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party. In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.
Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden’s secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.Nearly half of those study at schools fully or partly owned by private equity firms.
The opposition Green Party – like the Moderates long-time supporters of privately run schools but now backing the clamp-down – issued a public apology in a Swedish daily last month headlined “Forgive us, our policy led our schools astray”. It is a cautionary tale in a market estimated to have been worth more than $400 billion worldwide in a 2010 report by the International Finance Corporation.
Sweden replaced one of the world’s most tightly regulated school systems with one of the most deregulated, leading to scandals like the 2011 case of the convicted paedophile who set up several schools quite legally.“I’ve often said it’s been easier to start an independent school than set up a hot-dog stand,” said Eva-Lis Siren, head of Lararforbundet, Sweden’s biggest teachers union.
The private schools brought in many practices once found exclusively in the corporate world, such as performance-based bonuses for staff and advertising in Stockholm’s subway system, while competition has put teachers under pressure to award higher grades and market their schools.
While it is difficult to say how, or even whether, private involvement and falling standards are linked, the NAE says there are indications the market-driven reforms have contributed to widen the gaps in school performances.The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) benchmark Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study paints a bleak picture, with Sweden now ranking below Russia in maths.
The idea that private equity firms and large corporations would run hundreds of schools was a far cry from the individual, locally-run schools envisaged at the start.
“This was something that was not … even considered in one’s wildest dreams,” said Staffan Lundh, who handled school issues in the prime minister’s office at the time and now leads evaluation at the National Agency for Education (NAE).
Where have I heard this before? In Michigan:
“The idea behind charters was to have locally run, autonomous schools that would foster innovation,” he said. “But now you have schools in Michigan that are operated by companies based as far away as Florida and California,” with a minimum of local control and using a cookie-cutter approach.
Moreover, he said, for-profit schools tend to spend less on instruction and student-support services and “much more” on administration, compared to nonprofit charters and regular public schools.
As an example, he cited National Heritage Academies, a Grand Rapids-based company that operates 71 schools across the country, including 43 in Michigan.
Budgets posted on the websites of Paramount and Kalamazoo Public Schools support Miron’s analysis about the difference in expenditures.
Those budgets indicate Paramount is spending about 47 percent of its budget on instruction this school year, compared to 62 percent at KPS. For administration, Paramount spends 16 percent of its budget compared to 7 percent for KPS. Paramount does not have bus transportation, which comprises about 5 percent of the KPS budget. Joe DiBenedetto, spokesman for National Heritage Academies, declined to talk about the company’s profit margin or the pay scales for teachers and administrators.“We do not disclose financial information on NHA, as it is a private company,” he said.
NHA is a private company when they don’t want to disclose financial information, but a public school when they want public funding. How do they make a profit? Easy. They pay teachers less.
Looking at our patched-together, fragmented, ruinously expensive health care “system” can anyone tell me why we would take an existing, universal public system and turn it into a publicly-funded private system?
How about we choose not to make this terrible mistake, because we will deeply regret it. If we lose public schools we’ll never get them back.
Ask the thousands of protesters in Chile. School privatization is a disaster there, too
“Forgive us, our policy led our schools astray”Post + Comments (56)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 126 Comments
This post is in: Even the "Liberal" New Republic
I’m going to pile on the TNR piece Anne Laurie mentioned last night. For some reason, if you’re going to be a shrewd DC pundit, you need to understand and promulgate the fact that each wing of the two absolutely balanced parties are ideological mirror images. So, when Noam Scheiber writes his Elizabeth Warren piece in the liberal New Republic, we get this:
As a result, Warren’s 2012 victory in Massachusetts set off a minor cottage industry of speculation about whether she would be a senator in the mold of other celebrities, like Hillary Clinton and Al Franken, who made collegiality and discretion the hallmarks of their early years in office—or whether she would follow the model of the body’s noisier gadflies, like former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and his spiritual successor, Ted Cruz of Texas.
Spoiler alert: she’s a Cruz. The evidence for that fact is that she had the temerity to ask a couple of tough questions at a Senate Finance Committee. That’s the moral equivalent of Ted Cruz’ mission to foment a mutiny against his party’s Speaker of the House.
This line of reasoning is dumb in many ways, but let me pick the one that a savvy correspondent should know: Even though your carefully cultivated Senate sources will argue otherwise, there is no percentage in someone with Presidential ambitions venerating the rules of the Senate. In case the last decade of polls have somehow escaped Scheiber’s notice, people fucking hate Congress. If Warren wants to follow the Obama path from the Senate to the Oval Office, one way to do it is to buck the asinine convention that a Congressional hearing can be nothing but speechifying. You don’t have to be a “populist” to understand that the average American of almost any party wants some bankers in jail, and at the hearing Scheiber mentions, Warren just asked the same questions the rest of us wanted asked: why aren’t you prosecuting bankers.
After the jump, I’m going to quote a bit more of his description of how that exchange went down, because he clenches and flexes pretty hard to get his panties in a bunch over what was really a pretty decent piece of politics:
by $8 blue check mistermix| 102 Comments
This post is in: Even the "Liberal" New Republic
Michael Kinsley’s pristine moderate liberal mind can’t handle the untidy situation in DC, so of course the only thing Democrats can do is cave:
The media will no doubt call Obama weak because he gave in. So let them. Sticks and stones. Meanwhile, will the Republicans really take the past couple of weeks as a precedent and push him around on every issue that comes up? Highly unlikely. They are already getting most of the blame. They surely don’t look forward to trying to convince voters it was such a swell experience that they’re going to put us through it again and again.
Let me answer the question that I bolded: Yes. Because when you win by taking hostages, you’ll keep taking hostages. Seems obvious to me, but if you’ve been the editor of Slate for 7 years, you just can’t resist the impulse to ignore the obvious and assume the contrary.
(Thanks to reader J for sending this in.)
by David Anderson| 78 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Lindsey Graham's Fee Fees, NANCY SMASH!, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Clap Louder!, Democratic Cowardice, Even the "Liberal" New Republic, Fools! Overton Window!, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Nobody could have predicted, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
Jay Ackroyd laughs when I state that there is serious path dependency issues on transitioning the US health finance and health care providing systems from the current set of kludges that are based on heavy but hidden governmental involvement in both for most working age adults, and then single payer systems for the elderly, the disabled and the poor.
He thinks that path dependency can be waived away by changing the eligibility age for Medicare.
The US has a single payer system in place already. Just change the Medicare eligibility age. Set premiums. Compete!
If my memory serves me correctly, there was a recent proposal to do just that and it failed.
Lieberdouche, Medicare for All, 218, 50, 1Post + Comments (78)