Kevin Drum Feed | Mother Jones Mother Jones logo en One Man's True Experience With the Naked Web <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>One thing led to another this weekend, and yesterday I found myself playing around with Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1. It had probably been 20 years since I'd last used it. It turned out to be surprisingly nice once I got everything set up, so then I got curious and set up the tile version too. (That's the Windows RT version, aka the Metro version, aka the Modern UI version, aka whatever Microsoft is calling it this month.) It was actually fairly nice too. I have a few UI quibbles here and there, but that's true of every app. Generally speaking, it was pretty good.</p> <p>But. It turns out that the MUI version of IE doesn't support add-ons. Don't ask me why. That means I couldn't install AdBlock. And holy cow: during the hour or so that I spent checking things out I felt like I was under assault. My browser was deluged with gigantic banner ads, flash ads, auto-play video ads, animated GIF ads, ads that danced across my screen, and a relentless series of popup ads that apparently have figured out how to foil the built-in popup blocker.</p> <p>I've spent the last ten years or so browsing with ad blocking of some kind enabled. This was the first time in a long while that I had been forced to spend time on the naked web, so to speak. Have I just lost my tolerance for this kind of thing? Or has advertising on the web really gotten an order of magnitude worse since the early aughts? This is an academic question, since needless to say I won't be using the MUI version of IE anytime soon, but I'm still curious. What say you, commenters?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Tech Sun, 16 Mar 2014 15:42:26 +0000 Kevin Drum 247586 at US Announces Plan to Give Up Control Over Internet Plumbing <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Well, this is interesting:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move likely to please international critics but alarm many business leaders and others who rely on smooth functioning of the Web.</p> <p>Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade and was supercharged by the backlash to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance last year.</p> </blockquote> <p>I won't pretend I'm thrilled about this, even if it was probably inevitable at some point. Whatever else you can say about the United States and the leverage its intelligence community gets from control over internet plumbing, it's also true that the US has been a pretty competent and reliable administrator of the most revolutionary and potentially subversive network ever invented. Conversely, global organizations don't have a great track record at technocratic management, and world politics&mdash;corrosive at best, illiberal and venal at worst&mdash;could kill the goose that laid the golden egg. I certainly understand why the rest of the world chafes at American control, but I nonetheless suspect that it might be the best of a bad bunch of options.</p> <p>Then again, maybe not. There are also plenty of global standards-setting organizations that do a perfectly good job. Slowly and bureaucratically, maybe, but that's to be expected. Maybe ICANN will go the same way. We'll see.</p> <p>In any case, I think we can expect Republicans to go ballistic over this.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum International Tech Fri, 14 Mar 2014 22:01:18 +0000 Kevin Drum 247571 at Friday Cat Blogging - 14 March 2014 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>The sun has been back for two weeks now and Domino has decided it's probably safe to come outside. Not very far outside, mind you, but she does adore the stiffly-bristled welcome mat we have outside our front door. It's a great place to scratch an itch, and when you're done, it catches the afternoon sun and provides a lovely napping spot.</p> <p>In other news, <a href="" target="_blank">click here</a> and decide if you think I look like a badass. I think perhaps the headline writer was engaging in a wee flight of fancy. However, I commend to my editors the reporter's deadpan note about how I feel about blogging: "For him, it's 'the perfect job,' noting he rarely hears from his bosses at <em>Mother Jones</em>." That, um, didn't quite turn out right, did it?</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_domino_2014_03_14.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 15px 0px 5px 40px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:57:10 +0000 Kevin Drum 247561 at The United States Is a Data Wonk's Dream <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Via Emily Badger,</a> here's an interesting chart showing which countries are most open with national data. Obviously rich countries do best at this kind of statistical recordkeeping, but some rich countries do better than others, and the US is one of the best. In fact, it would be <em>the</em> best if not for the fact that corporate registration is a state function, and the US therefore scores approximately zero for its lack of a national corporate registry database. Full data for all countries is <a href="" target="_blank">here.</a> Enjoy.</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_open_data_chart.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 15px 0px 5px 11px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum International Tech Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:24:52 +0000 Kevin Drum 247556 at If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Fareed Zakaria has a piece in the <em>Washington Post</em> about Ukraine. <a href="" target="_blank">Here's the headline:</a></p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Why (this time) Obama must lead</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>So I clicked. Plenty of sensible stuff. The EU dithered. Ukraine blew up. Putin responded stupidly. "Let&rsquo;s not persist in believing that Moscow&rsquo;s moves have been strategically brilliant," Zakaria says. His invasion of Crimea has turned the rest of Ukraine irretrievably pro-Western; triggered lots of anti-Russian sentiment on his borders; soured relations with Poland and Hungary; and sparked Western sanctions that are going to hurt.</p> <p>And Zakaria says this is important stuff. "The crisis in Ukraine is the most significant geopolitical problem since the Cold War....And it involves a great global principle: whether national boundaries can be changed by brute force. If it becomes acceptable to do so, what will happen in Asia, where there are dozens of contested boundaries &mdash; and several great powers that want to remake them?"</p> <p>OK, fine. So what should Obama do? Here it is:</p> <blockquote> <p>Obama must rally the world, push the Europeans and negotiate with the Russians.</p> </blockquote> <p>Go ahead and click the link if you don't believe me. This is, literally, the sum total of Zakaria's advice. So what's the point? Obviously Obama is already doing this. Is he doing it badly? Is he pressing for the wrong sanctions? Is he working too much behind the scenes and not enough publicly? Should he be threatening a military response? Should he ask Zach Galifianakis to tape an episode of "Between Two Ferns" with Vladimir Putin? Or what?</p> <p>Maybe I'm more frustrated than usual with this because I tend to like Zakaria. Sure, he's sometimes a little bit too weather-vaney for my taste, but he's smart and practical and tends to understand the big picture pretty well. So why not tell us what he thinks the US response should be? We could use some judicious advice to make up for the tsunami of idiocy emanating from the crackpot wing of the foreign policy community right now.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Foreign Policy International Fri, 14 Mar 2014 17:20:27 +0000 Kevin Drum 247551 at Hostage Taking Is Back! <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Last month</a> I passed along the news that, in a break with recent tradition, Congress might actually do something useful and pass a permanent fix to Medicare's Sustainable Growth Rate, a well-meaning policy that turned out not to be sustainable at all when its formula started calling for actual cuts in payments to doctors. Every year Congress addresses this by passing a one-year "doc fix," but recently a bipartisan effort finally came together to pass a permanent modification. Hooray!</p> <p>But now it turns out that congressional Republicans enjoy the tradition of dysfunctional government too much to give it up. <a href="" target="_blank">Sahil Kapur reports that hostage-taking is back:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>House Republicans expect to vote this Friday on legislation that would risk steep, destabilizing Medicare cuts at the end of the month unless Democrats agree to a five-year delay of Obamacare's individual mandate.</p> <p>It mirrors some of the brinkmanship in the government shutdown fight last fall in that the GOP is using a must-pass bill as a vehicle to chop the Affordable Care Act. Democratic leaders have repeatedly rejected proposals to tinker with the mandate to buy insurance and have warned Republicans not to tie a physician payment fix to their partisan quest to unravel Obamacare.</p> </blockquote> <p>Insurance companies oppose this. Doctors oppose this. The CBO says it would be a disaster. It obviously has no chance of passing. But it looks like Republicans are going right up to the brink once again. I guess that once you've tasted the thrill of threatening to shoot a hostage, nothing else quite compares.</p> <p>Besides, there's a midterm election coming up. Have I mentioned that before?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Congress Health Care Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:06:22 +0000 Kevin Drum 247546 at Chart of the Day: China's Debt Bubble Continues to Swell <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Via Paul Krugman,</a> Atif Mian and Amir Sufi give us the chart below today to chew over. It shows China's declining trade surplus over the past decade, which authorities have effectively offset by a dramatic increase in private credit in order to boost domestic demand. The authors <a href="" target="_blank">explain how this happened:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>China got a break starting 2003....The rest of the world&nbsp;&mdash; and in particular the United States&nbsp;&mdash; was willing to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars every year to purchase Chinese goods (among other things)....The result was reduced pressure on domestic debt creation, and domestic debt went down from 125% of GDP in 2003 to almost 100% of GDP in 2008.</p> <p>....The continued borrowing by western countries was not sustainable and by 2008 global demand for Chinese goods collapsed....How could China create new demand for its productive capacity? The answer once again came in the form of a rapid rise in domestic private debt. The Chinese state-owned banks with explicit prodding from the government opened their spigots. The country has seen an explosive growth in domestic private debt since 2008.</p> </blockquote> <p>Is this sustainable? Probably not. It's yet another reason to be concerned about the continued fragility of the global economy. We're probably not strong enough to withstand a major shock from China.</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_china_debt_3.jpg" style="margin: 15px 0px 5px 0px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum China Economy Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:26:25 +0000 Kevin Drum 247541 at If Reagan Were President, He Would…Do Nothing Much About Ukraine <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>On the Senate floor today, John McCain <a href="" target="_blank">blistered</a> his fellow Republicans over their holdup of an aid bill to Ukraine. "Don't call yourself Reagan Republicans," he said. "Reagan would never tolerate this." Dan Drezner provides the history lesson via Twitter:</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_drezner_tweet_reagan.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 15px 0px 5px 25px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum International Thu, 13 Mar 2014 22:52:52 +0000 Kevin Drum 247516 at Sleeping In Ignites Teenager's Passion <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>The <em>New York Times</em> tells the story of Jilly Dos Santos, a Missouri student who took an AP world history class that <a href="" target="_blank">"explores the role of leadership":</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Students were urged to find a contemporary topic that ignited their passion. One morning, the teachers mentioned that a school board committee had recommended an earlier start time to solve logistical problems in scheduling bus routes. The issue would be discussed at a school board hearing in five days. If you do not like it, the teachers said, do something.</p> <p>Jilly did the ugly math: A first bell at 7:20 a.m. meant she would have to wake up at 6 a.m.</p> <p>She had found her passion.</p> </blockquote> <p>Jilly is my hero. The kids these days are all right in my book.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Health Thu, 13 Mar 2014 22:22:52 +0000 Kevin Drum 247501 at Tesla Pits Texas vs. the Free Market <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Tesla is having a lot of well-publicized problems selling its cars direct to the public. Most states mandate that cars can only be sold through independent dealers, and that's shut Tesla out of <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_tesla_roadster.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 20px 15px 30px;">the market in plenty of places, including ultra-free market bastions like Texas. <a href="" target="_blank">Paul Waldman comments:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>You'd think that if conservatives really believed all their rhetoric about the value of unfettered free markets, they would be all over this issue, advocating for Tesla's side of the controversy and campaigning to break up the anti-free-enterprise car dealer oligopolies. But of course, we're talking about Tesla, and liberals like electric cars, and therefore conservatives feel obligated to hate electric cars, so that probably won't happen.</p> </blockquote> <p>OK, sure, but here's the thing: Teslas are also really expensive. That means they can only be purchased by rich people, and conservatives really like rich people. So this is a dilemma, no?</p> <p>Now, I suppose that in Texas they don't think much of any car that doesn't run on refined hydrocarbon products, so maybe the cognitive dissonance there is less than I think. But North Carolina doesn't have any oil. So what's the deal there?</p> <p>In any case, I want to know who's buying these cars, anyway. Last Halloween, Marian and I decided to escape the house and eat out. In order to kill time, we walked around the shopping center we had gone to and I spied a Tesla store there. So I popped in and sat down in a Roadster. I didn't even come close to fitting, and I'm only an inch or so taller than six feet. Am I just pickier than most tall people? Do tall people who buy Teslas slouch a lot? Or has Tesla simply abandoned the quarter of the market over six feet?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Climate Change Thu, 13 Mar 2014 19:04:42 +0000 Kevin Drum 247476 at It's Time to Release the Torture Report, Mr. President <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">From President Obama,</a> commenting on the Senate's investigation of Bush-era torture tactics:</p> <blockquote> <p>I am absolutely committed to declassifying that report as soon as the report is completed. In fact, I would urge them to go ahead and complete the report, send it to us. We will declassify those findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward.</p> </blockquote> <p>Say what? Last I heard, the report was completed in 2012. The CIA responded last June. Dianne Feinstein has been pushing for declassification of at least the report's executive summary ever since. So if Feinstein wants to release the report, and Obama wants to release the report, what's the holdup?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Civil Liberties Congress Obama Thu, 13 Mar 2014 17:14:44 +0000 Kevin Drum 247456 at NSA: Foreign Leaders Often in the Dark About Spying Activities <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Glenn Greenwald publishes a fascinating little extract from an NSA document today. The unnamed author is explaining why cooperation with foreign countries doesn't change much depending on <a href="" target="_blank">which party wins national elections:</a></p> <blockquote> <p><em><strong>Are our foreign intelligence relationships usually insulated from short-term political ups and downs, or not?</strong></em></p> <p>(S//SI//REL) For a variety of reasons, our intelligence relationships are rarely disrupted by foreign political perturbations, international or domestic. First, we are helping our partners address critical intelligence shortfalls, just as they are assisting us. Second, in many of our foreign partners&rsquo; capitals, few senior officials outside of their defense-intelligence apparatuses are witting to any SIGINT connection to the U.S./NSA.</p> </blockquote> <p>In other words, you might be the prime minister, but that doesn't mean you have any idea what your intelligence apparatus is up to.</p> <p>Now, this is worth taking with a grain of salt, since we don't know who wrote this, or whether he really knew what he was talking about. I've been skeptical all along of the "shocked, shocked" reaction of many foreign leaders to the Snowden leaks, and I remain skeptical that they didn't know at least the broad outlines of what the NSA and their own intelligence services were up to. Nonetheless, this provides a useful window into the NSA's thinking: the less their political masters know, the better off they are.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Civil Liberties Thu, 13 Mar 2014 16:21:47 +0000 Kevin Drum 247446 at Can the Koch Brothers Force Voters to Take Republicans Seriously? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Greg Sargent takes a look at the Democratic strategy of <a href="" target="_blank">linking Republican senatorial candidates to the Koch brothers:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>As I noted the other day, this is all about creating a framework within which voters can be made to understand the actual policy agenda Republicans are campaigning on. This is what the Bain attacks on Mitt Romney were all about: <strong>Dem focus groups showed voters simply didn&rsquo;t believe Romney <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_koch_brothers.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 20px 15px 30px;">would cut entitlements (per the Paul Ryan plan) while cutting taxes on the rich.</strong> The Bain narrative made Romney&rsquo;s actual priorities more comprehensible.</p> <p>The Koch attacks are designed to do something similar. They aren&rsquo;t really about the Kochs. They are a proxy for the one percent, a means through which to tap into a general sense that the economy remains rigged in favor of the very wealthy. Placed into this frame, GOP policies &mdash; opposition to raising the minimum wage; the Paul Ryan fiscal blueprint, which would redistribute wealth upwards; opposition to the Medicaid expansion, which AFP is fighting in multiple states&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp; become more comprehensible as part of a broader storyline. In that narrative, Republican candidates are trying to maintain or even exacerbate an economic status quo that&rsquo;s stacked against ordinary Americans, while Dems are offering solutions to boost economic mobility and reduce inequality, which are increasingly pressing public concerns.</p> </blockquote> <p>Plus it's always good to have a bogeyman, isn't it?</p> <p>But I agree with Sargent, and this is something that relates back to my posts earlier this week about the fact that middle-class voters don't perceive a big difference between the economic policies of Democrats and Republicans. I argued that one reason for this is that Democrats haven't offered the middle class very much over the past few decades. But several critics pounced on this: even if it's true, they said, the <em>policy agendas</em> of the two parties are like night and day. Republicans want to privatize Social Security. They want to shred the safety net. They want to let the minimum wage erode to nothing. They want to eliminate capital gains taxes. They want to gut the EPA. Etc.</p> <p>But one of the mysteries of modern politics is that a lot of voters don't take this seriously. Partly it's because Republicans have never had the unified power to pass this agenda. Partly it's because they chickened out on a lot of it even when they came close to having that power during the Bush era. As a result, when Republicans engage in one of their periodic anti-government jeremiads it strikes a lot of people as just a sort of meaningless chant, words that Republican candidates have to mouth in order to prove they're part of the team, but not something they're really serious about.</p> <p>This frustrates Democrats no end, and they'd love to find a way to truly pin this stuff on the backs of Republican candidates. If Sargent is right, the Koch brothers are a way to do this.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Elections Money in Politics The Right Thu, 13 Mar 2014 15:14:37 +0000 Kevin Drum 247436 at Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Sen. Marco Rubio, still engaged in his campaign to reconnect with his tea party roots after blowing it on immigration reform, announced today that he plans to introduce a bill that would "prevent a 'takeover' of the Internet by the United Nations or another government regime." <a href="" target="_blank">Steve Benen is puzzled:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>To be sure, there are foreign governments that censor their citizens&rsquo; access to online content, but it&rsquo;s not at all clear why Rubio sees this as a domestic threat here in the U.S. As best as I can tell, there is no effort to empower the United Nations or anyone else to regulate the Internet on a global scale. Such a policy would certainly be scary, and would require opposition, but at present, it&rsquo;s also non-existent.</p> </blockquote> <p>For the most part, Rubio is probably just glomming onto a random bit of jingoism that he thinks will rile up his base. Still, there's actually a kernel of substance to this. Right now, the US Department of Commerce exercises ultimate control over the DNS root zone, and ICANN, a nonprofit that administers the DNS naming system, does so under contract <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_icann_logo.jpg" style="margin: 20px 20px 15px 30px;">to the Commerce Department. And while ICANN has a global governance structure, it's based in Los Angeles and has historically had a heavy American management presence.</p> <p>But that could change. <a href="" target="_blank">Last year,</a> in response to some of Edward Snowden's spying revelations, ICANN's board of directors issued a statement that called for "accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing." <a href="" target="_blank">Last month</a> the European Commission joined in, releasing a statement that lamented a "continued loss of confidence in the Internet and its current governance" and proposing new governance that would "identify how to globalise the IANA functions" and "establish a clear timeline for the globalisation of ICANN." <a href="" target="_blank">A week later,</a> rumors surfaced that ICANN might try to move its headquarters to Geneva.</p> <p>Now, this kind of squabbling has gone on forever, and the politics behind these statements is usually pretty murky. There's no telling if it will ever amount to anything, and in any case it certainly has nothing to do with UN control over the internet. Nonetheless, other countries have long chafed under effective American control of the internet's plumbing, and the Snowden leaks have given new momentum to calls for that control to end. It's possible that this is what Rubio is thinking of.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum International Tech Thu, 13 Mar 2014 01:42:10 +0000 Kevin Drum 247416 at Sorry, the Dog Ate My Homework <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/images/Blog_Scream.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 8px 20px 15px 30px;">Apologies for the radio silence. I had an adventure-filled afternoon. My first adventure prompted me to call for help, and I discovered that my iPhone's contact list had mysteriously disappeared. No calling for help for me! Eventually everything got sorted out, and when I finally got home I restored my contacts via iCloud. So no permanent harm done. Still, when my car strands me, I always figure my phone will bail me out. That's what a phone is for. Right? But what do you do when your phone mysteriously decides to strand you at the same time?</p> <p>And what did I do to deserve all this, anyway?</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Climate Change Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:15:51 +0000 Kevin Drum 247411 at An Endorsement From Barack Obama Might Be the Kiss of Death This Year <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>A friend just emailed me with a gloomy outlook for Democrats in this year's midterm elections. I don't really have an outlook myself yet, though obviously Democrats suffer from a difficult electoral map, the traditional 6-year blues, and their usual problem turning out voters in off-year elections. But as long as we're being gloomy, here's something else to add to the bonfire. It's an extract from a <a href="" target="_blank"><em>Washington Post</em> poll graphic</a> showing how voters react to congressional candidates being associated with the Obama administration. It's not a pretty picture.</p> <p>Now, if you want some good news, all you have to do is take a look at some of the other numbers in the poll, which makes it clear that most people have no idea what really makes them more or less likely to vote for someone. At the very bottom, for example, you'll see that virtually no one is willing to fess up that they're more likely to vote for an incumbent, despite mountains of research showing that incumbency is the single most powerful predictor of electoral success there is. So maybe this is all just a bunch of hooey. But I wouldn't bet on it.</p> <p><img align="middle" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_obama_endorse.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 15px 0px 5px 15px;"></p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Elections Obama Wed, 12 Mar 2014 17:31:50 +0000 Kevin Drum 247376 at The British Economy Is Not a Poster Child for Austerity <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Keith Humphreys notes that economic growth over the past year has been similar in Britain and the United States even though the two countries adopted <a href="" target="_blank">very different responses to the Great Recession:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>But don&rsquo;t expect the similar levels of growth in the two countries to shake many people&rsquo;s faith in their economic views. Most of the &ldquo;slim government&rdquo; crowd will argue that Britain didn&rsquo;t cut enough (or that the U.S. growth isn&rsquo;t real) and that&rsquo;s why the U.K. hasn&rsquo;t left the U.S. in the dust. Most increased government spending supporters will see proof that the stimulus wasn&rsquo;t big enough (or that the U.K. growth isn&rsquo;t real) because if it had been U.S. growth would be dwarfing that of the sceptred isle.</p> <p>Many people seem to have stable preferences about whether they want government bigger or smaller. They will point to current economic conditions as the reason for why their preferences should prevail, but their preferences do not change when those putatively justifying economic conditions fade away. Neither are most people fazed when the government spending policies they support (as well as those that they oppose) deliver different results than they expected. Motivated reason is such a force in this particular policy area that rather than arguing over what current economic conditions particularly require, debaters are probably <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_gdp_usa_britain_1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 0px 15px 30px;">better off cutting to the chase and arguing directly about the real issue: Disagreement about how big or small we want the government to be.</p> </blockquote> <p>I don't think this is fair. If you want to compare Britain and the US, you have to look at their entire growth trajectory since the start of the recession. The chart on the right is taken from <a href="" target="_blank">OECD numbers,</a> so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. And really, there is no comparison. As of 2012 (the most recent figures available from the OECD) Britain's GDP was still 3 percent below its 2007 level. By contrast, US GDP was 4 percent above its 2007 level.</p> <p>We can argue all day long about what caused this divergence, but I think the raw data is fairly unequivocal. Whatever the reason, the US economy really did suffer less and recover more robustly than the British economy.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Economy Wed, 12 Mar 2014 16:59:03 +0000 Kevin Drum 247371 at Florida Special Election Turns Out Not to Be Very Special After All <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Dave Weigel describes the dispiriting nature of yesterday's <a href="" target="_blank">special election in Florida's 13th district:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>The Pinellas County race pit Alex Sink, an uninspiring corporate Democrat, against David Jolly, a say-anything lobbyist who spent half a week of the stretch sleazily and baselessly calling his opponent a "bigot." Both of them came off like people desperately trying to sell you a time share.</p> </blockquote> <p>And then he explains <a href="" target="_blank">why Republican David Jolly won:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Having now spent 6,000-odd words on the Florida special election, I should admit that smart analysts predicted the result with one number. Two-hundred thousand. If that many ballots showed up in FL-13, Democrats were hitting their turnout models and winning the race. If fewer, they were losing. There were about 180,000 votes cast in the race, and the Democrats lost.</p> </blockquote> <p>Yep. Basically, it was a tight race in a district previously held by a Republican but won by Obama in 2012. And Jolly ended up winning by two percentage points. There's really not much of a lesson to be learned here aside from the fact that (a) it was truly a tossup district, and (b) Democrats have a really tough time with turnout in non-presidential elections. Eventually they're going to have to figure out what to do about that.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Congress Elections Wed, 12 Mar 2014 15:06:27 +0000 Kevin Drum 247361 at President Obama Takes on Overtime Rules <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">From the <em>New York Times</em>:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>President Obama this week will seek to force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated....Mr. Obama&rsquo;s decision to use his executive authority to change the nation&rsquo;s overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president&rsquo;s economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25.</p> </blockquote> <p>This is obviously just the latest in Obama's long series of Constitution-crushing moves that flout the law and turn the president into a despot-in-chief, gleefully kneecapping Congress and &mdash; wait. What's this?</p> <blockquote> <p>In 2004, business groups persuaded President George W. Bush&rsquo;s administration to allow them greater latitude on exempting salaried white-collar workers from overtime pay, even as organized labor objected....Mr. Obama&rsquo;s authority to act comes from his ability as president to revise the rules that carry out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress originally passed in 1938. Mr. Bush and previous <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/images/Blog_Constitution_0.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 0px 15px 30px;">presidents used similar tactics at times to work around opponents in Congress.</p> </blockquote> <p>Oh. So he's just doing the same stuff that every other president has done. Sorry about that. You may go about your business.</p> <p>For what it's worth, this gets to the heart of my impatience with all the right-wing hysteria about how Obama is shredding the Constitution and turning himself into a modern-day Napoleon. I'm not unpersuadable on the general point that Obama's executive orders sometimes go too far. But so far no one has provided any evidence that Obama has done anything more than any other modern president. They all issue executive orders, and Obama has actually issued fewer than most. They all urge the federal bureaucracy to reinterpret regulations in liberal or conservative directions. They all appoint agency heads with mandates to push the rulemaking process in agreeable directions. And they all get taken to court over this stuff and sometimes get their hats handed to them.</p> <p>Is Obama opening up whole new vistas in executive overreach? I don't see it, and I don't even see anyone making the case seriously. You can't just run down a laundry list of executive actions you happen to dislike. You need to take a genuinely evenhanded look at the past 30 or 40 years of this stuff and make an argument that Obama is doing something unique. Until you do that, you're just playing dumb partisan games.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Congress Labor Obama Wed, 12 Mar 2014 05:58:35 +0000 Kevin Drum 247341 at What Have the Democrats Ever Done For Us? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Yesterday</a> I wrote a post griping about the supposed mystery of why so many working and middle class voters (WMC for short) have drifted into the Republican Party over the past few decades. It's hardly a mystery, I said, and it's not an example of people voting against their own economic interest. The problem is simple: Democrats haven't really done much for the WMC lately, so fewer and fewer of them view Democrats as their champions. That being the case, they might as well vote for the party that promises to cut their taxes and supports traditional values.</p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Scott Lemieux agrees with many of the specific points I made,</a> but nonetheless thinks I went too far with my "general framing." His post is worth a read, and it also gives me a handy excuse to write a follow-up. This is partly to expand on some things, partly to defend myself, and partly to concede an issue or two. So in no special order, here goes:</p> <p><strong>First off, you're really talking about the <em>white</em> WMC, right?</strong></p> <p>Yeah, that's usually how this stuff is framed. As it happens, I'd argue that although the black and Hispanic WMC still firmly supports Democrats, they largely do it for noneconomic reasons these days. But that's a subject for a different day. What we're talking about here is mostly about the white WMC.</p> <p><strong>But has this drift toward the Republican Party even happened? Haven't you written before that it's a myth?</strong></p> <p>Yes I have, based on the work of Larry Bartels, who says this is solely a Southern phenomenon. However, I've been persuaded by <a href="" target="_blank">Lane Kenworthy's work</a> that the drift is both real and national. It's not a myth.</p> <p><strong>Lemieux says that relative to Republicans, Democrats are better than I give them credit for. What about that?</strong></p> <p>No argument there. I don't think anyone could read this site for more than five minutes and not know what I think of the modern Republican Party.</p> <p><iframe align="right" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="290" src="" style="margin: 8px 0px 15px 30px;" width="450"></iframe></p> <p><strong>Plus he says that Obamacare has been a big plus for the WMC. And a bunch of folks on Twitter said the same thing.</strong></p> <p>That's a point I'll concede. I was thinking of a few things here. First, most WMC voters already get health coverage at work, so Obamacare's impact on them is limited. Beyond that, the Medicaid expansion was targeted at the poor, and the exchange subsidies get pretty small by the time you reach a middle-class income. But my memory was faulty on that score. A middle-class family with an income of, say, $50-60,000 still gets a pretty hefty subsidy. And of course there are other features of Obamacare that help the middle class too. I was a little too dismissive of this.</p> <p>On the other hand, this is also a pretty good example of Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They stuck together unanimously to pass the bill, which was great. But ideological ambivalence had already watered it down significantly by then, and ever since Obama signed it, it seems like half the party has been running for cover lest anyone know they voted for it. If Democrats themselves can't loudly sell their own bill as a middle class boon, it's hardly any surprise that lots of middle-class voters don't see it that way either.</p> <p><strong>But Democrats have done a lot of things beyond just Obamacare.</strong></p> <p>Sure, <a href="" target="_blank">and I've listed them myself from time to time.</a> But here's the thing: folks like Lemieux and me can look at this stuff and make a case that Democrats are helping the middle class. Unfortunately, it's mostly too abstract to register with average voters. Did the stimulus bill help the WMC? Probably, but it's not concrete enough for anyone to feel like it helped them personally. How about the CFPB, which Lemieux mentions? I think it's great. But if you stopped a dozen average folks on the street, not one would have the slightest inkling of what it is or whether they benefited from it. These things are just too small, too watered-down, and too sporadic to have much impact. What's more, whatever small impact they do have gets wiped out whenever Democrats support things like the 2005 bankruptcy bill or get cold feet about repealing something like the carried interest loophole.</p> <p><strong>OK, but why did you "yadda yadda" all the genuinely big things Democrats have done for the poor?</strong></p> <p>I didn't. I explicitly mentioned them. And this isn't some kind of shell game over definitions of "poor" and "working class." After all, no one ever asks why the poor have drifted away from the Democratic Party, even though they presumably have social views that are similar to the WMC. You know why? Because they haven't drifted away. And why is that? <em>Because Democrats have done stuff for them</em>.</p> <p>That's the whole point here. The WMC feels like Democrats do stuff for the poor, but not for them. And there's a lot of truth to that.</p> <p><strong>But what can Democrats do? Republicans block every proposal they ever make.</strong></p> <p>I'm not blaming them for that. Politics is politics. And I'm not ignoring the fact that Dems stand up against Republicans all the time. They do. Nor is this an exercise in "both sides do it." Obviously Republicans are far more slavishly devoted to the interests of corporations and the rich than Democrats.</p> <p>Hell, I don't even personally oppose every manifestation of the&nbsp;neoliberal policy evolution of the post-70s Democratic Party. Some of it I support. I'm a fairly moderate, neoliberalish squish myself most of the time. If you care about evidence in the policymaking process, the evidence is pretty strong that some lefty dreams just don't make sense.</p> <p>Nonetheless, the corporate drift of the Democratic Party since the 80s is simply a matter of record. Lemieux and I can toss out lists of small-ball Democratic accomplishments all day long, but the vast majority of low-information voters have never heard of them or don't think they really do them any good. Maybe they're mistaken or misguided, but that's the way it is.</p> <p>If Democrats want to regain the support of the WMC, they have to consistently unite behind stuff that benefits the WMC in very simple, concrete ways. Democrats do that on abortion, for example, and everyone knows where they stand even if they don't win all their battles. It's the same way with economic policy. Even if they don't win all or most of their battles, they need to unite behind real programs for the middle class; they need to talk about them loudly; they need to stop diluting their message by taking the side of the plutocrats whenever it's convenient; and they have to keep it up for decades.</p> <p>Maybe the reality of modern politics prevents this. But if that's the case, then it's time to stop navel-gazing about why the WMC has drifted away from the Democrats. The answer is staring us all in the face.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Economy Labor Wed, 12 Mar 2014 03:21:37 +0000 Kevin Drum 247336 at The Mystery of the Disappearing Malaysian Plane Deepens Even Further <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>Here's the latest strangeness surrounding the <a href="" target="_blank">disappearance of that Malaysian airliner:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>As a search continued Tuesday for a Malaysian airliner that mysteriously disappeared, <strong>Malaysian military officials said radar data showed it inexplicably turned around and headed toward the Malacca Strait,</strong> hundreds of miles off its scheduled flight path, news agencies and Malaysian media reported.</p> <p>....<strong>Search teams from 10 nations had initially focused their efforts mainly east of the peninsula</strong>....A high-ranking military official involved in the investigation confirmed that the plane changed course and said it was believed to <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_malaysia_flight_370_2.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 0px 15px 30px;">be flying low, the Associated Press reported.</p> </blockquote> <p>It is, of course, mysterious that the plane veered off course and turned west an hour after takeoff. But that's not the real puzzle. The plane disappeared on Saturday. If the Malaysian military tracked it turning west into the Malacca Strait in real time, how is it that it took them three days to bother telling anyone about this? That seems damn peculiar even if things were just generally fubared at the time. <a href=";_r=0" target="_blank">Here's another account:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>The [Malaysian] air force chief did not say what kind of signals the military had tracked. But his remarks raised questions about whether the military had noticed the plane as it flew across the country and about when it informed civilian authorities.</p> <p>According to the general&rsquo;s account, the last sign of the plane was recorded at 2:40 a.m., and the aircraft was then near Pulau Perak, an island more than 100 miles off the western shore of the Malaysian peninsula. <strong>That assertion stunned aviation experts as well as officials in China,</strong> who had been told again and again that the authorities lost contact with the plane more than an hour earlier, when it was on course over the Gulf of Thailand, east of the peninsula. But the new account seemed to fit with the decision on Monday, previously unexplained, to expand the search area to include waters west of the peninsula.</p> </blockquote> <p><a href="" target="_blank">And yet another:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>It is unclear why the west coast contact, if correct, was not made public until now. Asked on Monday why crews were searching the strait, the country's civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman told reporters: <strong>"There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I can't."</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>Mysteriouser and mysteriouser.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Military Tue, 11 Mar 2014 22:14:10 +0000 Kevin Drum 247316 at Opposition to Obamacare Remains Under 40 Percent, the Same as Always <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Greg Sargent</a> points us to the <a href="" target="_blank">latest CNN poll on Obamacare</a> today, one of the few polls that accurately judges public attitudes on the subject. Instead of just asking whether people support or oppose the law, CNN asks if their opposition is because the law is too liberal or <em>not liberal enough</em>. The latter aren't tea partiers <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_cnn_obamacare_support_february_2014.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 5px 15px 30px;">who hate Obamacare, they're lefties and Democrats who mostly support the concept of Obamacare but want it to go further. Counting them as opponents of Obamacare has always been seriously misleading.</p> <p>I went ahead and charted CNN's poll results over time, and they've been remarkably stable. Ever since the law passed, about 40 percent of the country has opposed it, while more than 50 percent have either supported it or said they want it to go even further. This goes a long way toward explaining the supposedly mysterious result that lots of people oppose Obamacare but few want to repeal it. The truth is that actual opposition has always been a minority view. Polls routinely show that only about <a href="" target="_blank">40 percent of Americans want to repeal Obamacare,</a> and there's nothing mysterious about that once you understand that this is also the level of actual opposition to the law.</p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Sargent has more here,</a> including some interesting internals and crosstabs.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Health Care Tue, 11 Mar 2014 18:15:59 +0000 Kevin Drum 247296 at President Obama Reaches Out to the Kids <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><iframe align="right" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="290" src="" style="margin: 8px 0px 15px 30px;" width="450"></iframe></p> <p>Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that President Obama has taped a <em>Between Two Ferns</em> segment with comedian Zach Galifianakis to promote Obamacare. <a href="" target="_blank"><em>Time's</em> James Poniewozik comments:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>It&rsquo;s a specific, unusually edgy kind of comedy for any politician, much less a sitting President&ndash;a cringe-humor show whose whole idea is playing off staged discomfort with the guest. Obama trades insults, he stews at the clueless slights (will he build his Presidential library &ldquo;in Hawaii or your home country of Kenya&rdquo;?), he needles Galiafinakis about his handsome Hangover co-star Bradley Cooper. (&ldquo;He kind of carried that movie, didn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;)</p> <p>It&rsquo;s the tone of the comedy as much as the online medium that really targets the young audience Obama is pitching to here. There&rsquo;s a cringe-humor generation gap; <strong>if you&rsquo;re over a certain age, or simply haven&rsquo;t watched much of a certain kind of contemporary comedy, you&rsquo;ll probably watch it thinking that the segment is bombing and Obama is getting legitimately angry.</strong> But it&rsquo;s a good fit for Obama&rsquo;s sense of humor, which is a little dry and a little cutting&ndash;in ways that don&rsquo;t always play in rooms when there are no ferns present.</p> </blockquote> <p>This doesn't seem quite right to me. I'm in my fifties, and I thought it was pretty funny. Maybe you have to be even older not to get it? Post-SNL, perhaps? I'm not sure. Go ahead and <a href="" target="_blank">watch it here</a> and let's do a reader poll. Rate it from 1 to 5 stars and be sure to include your age.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Health Care Tue, 11 Mar 2014 16:33:44 +0000 Kevin Drum 247286 at Taking Advantage of Cancer Patients for Fun and Profit <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p>When we last met cancer patient Julie Boonstra, she was the centerpiece of a TV ad claiming that her new insurance plan under Obamacare was far more expensive than her old plan and didn't cover all her medications. On examination, it turned out to cost about the same. Today, however, <img align="right" alt="" class="image image-_original" src="/files/blog_boonstra.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin: 20px 20px 15px 30px;">the <em>Detroit News</em> reports that, in fact, Obamacare will <em>save</em> Boonstra <a href="" target="_blank">more than a thousand dollars per year:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Boonstra said Monday her new plan she dislikes is the Blue Cross Premier Gold health care plan, which caps patient responsibility for out-of-pocket costs at $5,100 a year, lower than the federal law&rsquo;s maximum of $6,350 a year. It means the new plan will save her at least $1,200 compared with her former insurance plan she preferred that was ended under Obamacare&rsquo;s coverage requirements.</p> <p><strong>....When advised of the details of her Blues&rsquo; plan, Boonstra said the idea that it would be cheaper &ldquo;can&rsquo;t be true.&rdquo;</strong></p> <p><strong>&ldquo;I personally do not believe that,&rdquo; Boonstra said.</strong></p> <p>....She also said her out-of-pocket maximum could be higher than advertised because there&rsquo;s one prescription that was previously covered by her old plan that isn&rsquo;t and she now buys with a separate prescription discount card....<strong>Boonstra&rsquo;s health plan covers all prescriptions, [Blue Cross spokesman Andy] Hetzel said,</strong> who advises she use the coverage instead of a prescription discount card so co-pays would go toward meeting the out-of-pocket maximum.</p> </blockquote> <p>If you think I'm posting about this just because it's a big, fat poke in the face to the Koch-funded ambulance chasers at AFP who originally ran the Boonstra ad&mdash;well, you're right. But there's a real point to be made about this too. I don't know anything about Julie Boonstra, but it sure seems as if she's been bamboozled by a bunch of fanatic Obamacare haters who have caused her a ton of pain and misery. Boonstra had some genuine problems with the rollout of the exchanges, just as many people did, but once that finally got straightened out, she ended up with coverage that was both better and less expensive than her previous plan. There's no reason for her to be so anxious about her continued care.</p> <p>But she never really learned that. For purely venal political reasons, AFP found itself a woman fighting cancer and proceeded to stoke her fears of her new health coverage in order to get a TV ad made. <em>A TV ad</em>. These are people who, if there's any justice, should not be sleeping easily at night. They are swine.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Health Care Tue, 11 Mar 2014 15:43:47 +0000 Kevin Drum 247281 at Dianne Feinstein Upset that CIA Is Spying on Dianne Feinstein <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" ""> <html><body> <p><a href="" target="_blank">If the CIA has lost Dianne Feinstein....</a></p> <blockquote> <p>The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday sharply accused the CIA of violating federal law and undermining the constitutional principle of congressional oversight as she detailed publicly for the first time how the agency secretly removed documents from computers used by her panel to investigate a controversial interrogation program.</p> <p>Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that the situation amounted to attempted intimidation of congressional investigators, adding: <strong>&ldquo;I am not taking it lightly.&rdquo;</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>In the end, I suspect that she will indeed take it lightly. Still, if there's one thing an intelligence agency shouldn't do, it's get caught monitoring the Senate committee that oversees it. The intelligence community can spy on millions of Americans and Dianne Feinstein yawns. But spy on Dianne Feinstein and you're in trouble.</p> </body></html> Kevin Drum Civil Liberties Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:52:13 +0000 Kevin Drum 247271 at