The Spit Shine

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Unimaginable Deployment Tragedy

As I mentioned last week, there are 2-3 stories each week that leap off the page (just from among the ones reported).

Here is one from this week:

A young soldier was so traumatised by the prospect of his first Iraqi posting, he took an overdose which killed him.

Private Jason Chelsea couldn't come to terms with the thought that he might have to "shoot children" carrying suicide bombs.
He was so afraid, on the eve of the tour of duty with the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment he took a lethal quantity of paracetamol and iron tablets.

[+/-] Show Full Post...

President Trying to Use Bully Pulpit to Rebrand/Rescue GOP

WILL IT STICK?

The GOP are trying like the dickens to get back what they lost in pursuit of electoral politics [my GOP debt-spending figures here], with earmarks soaring to 30,000 per annum, pork-laden defense supplemental bills and more. I mean, wasn't it obvious with the way that Dick Cheney leap off the page to go after Rangle that they are desperate to make hay, to show their stripes, on any little issue that comes up?

Will the veto-pen get sympathetic coverage and reception?

With some luck and if the Dems are up to the challenge, it will backfire.

[+/-] Show Full Post...

Did Spitzer Get Enough Support?

I was fully behind Spitzer's plan, which appears to be withdrawn, now.

It's important that, as some States exercise their "right" move toward a "Fine, Deport, and Detain" recession, that other States and localities have the right to do just the opposite.

What's more, there is NO question that everyone is safer, in a whole list of ways, if the maximum number of people in the nation are documented. As a driver in a State that is not no-fault, I'd really like for the guy in the next car to (a) have done what it takes to get a license and (b) have an 'official' document trail.

So, I have to wonder, did Spitzer get enough support for his plan from national politicians or not? Why are the Dems cowed in the corner on the issue? They are not going to get ahead by ducking.

[+/-] Show Full Post...

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

War At Any Price - The Tax Assessment for R-ubberstamping

Joint Econ Committee issues a report, "War at Any Price".

Selected tables below.

NOT JUST DOMESTIC PRIORITIES

Understandably, the authors show the tradeoffs in terms of domestic priorities. Another framework is to show them in foreign policy tradeoffs.

Understandably, the authors show the tradeoffs in terms of domestic priorities. Another framework is to show them in foreign policy tradeoffs.

If you take an annual amount of $2,300 for what the average Iraqi might earn (that's high), then one might come out estimating that we have spent an entire lifetime of working-age income - 40 years - for each Iraqi (including the estimated 2 million who have fled). Couldn't we have bought a LOT of change the old fashioned way with that kind of money? Maybe a half such a lifetime, if you take a lower estimate of cost.

THE NEXT STEPS

One thing to look at is how much the Bush economy has been bolstered by stimulative fiscal policy, not related to tax cuts; but the GWOT debt-spending. The rise in oil prices is a GDP drag, but the full effect of it may not have been felt because the incremental spending on "GWOT" is stimulative.

A QUICK LOOK AT THE ESTIMATES

Interest on Debt

I like that they have broken out interest to foreign owners, a refinement I should make. However, this economically relevant value, while not incorrect, masks a fuller, apples-to-apples comparison, which is something I'd rather not leave out of the numbers.

Requip the military

This report suggests the DoD has guessed at $40 billion for my TBA line-item of re-quipping the military. However, if you are watching the CRS, the DoD has changed its accounting rules in the past year, to let field commanders include in OEF/OIF operations figures items that were previously restricted to other budgets for wear-and-tear of equipment. In other words, this cost may be getting buried, right or wrong.

Oil Costs

Their estimate for "lost investment" is hard to evaluate. Comparing to my macro model, it is high using their figures, but even cutting it in half would still be $400 bn. However, I think the true oil lifting cost is a lot lower than they use.

THE COST OF NO-CUT, JUST-LET 'R-RUN

Free Image Hosting at allyoucanupload.com

[+/-] Show Full Post...

"Free people" and Healthcare Reform

Jon Cohn seems to have made some inroads to AS's closed mind on healthcare reform.

Can we say that AS is learning something about how innovation really takes place inside Pharma and for medical devices? He doesn't seem to dispute Jon's points, at least, on that.

Here are some things that the intellectually honest conservative might grapple with (without pretending that the current approach represents "free people"):

The Nanny Corporation is not a solution, but a problem.
Private health "insurance" (as it exists now) is an (expensive?) net loss to individuals, because insurance companies must pay out less than they take in, in order to make a profit.
There is no a priori reason to believe that a "free-market" system brings the desired innovations or produces them without massive inefficiencies and waste.

If someone asked Cohn's question of me, "What is the best case against healthcare reform?", I'd be tempted to say it was that it gets done wrong, that the Republicans force some "compromise" and that the Democrats accept it.

AS's concern is further down the list.

[+/-] Show Full Post...

Ready to Rumble

See, just when you get bored with AS, he comes up throwing punches, like this. Good stuff:

Pat Robertson is a loon and an anti-Semite and a vicious homophobe who blamed Americans for 9/11. Giuliani didn't receive some unsolicited money from him; he actually stood on a platform and embraced him. Why one standard for Paul and another for Giuliani?

Of course, Ron Paul probably cannot be trusted with the Presidency. Why the double-standard (especially w/r/t Clinton)?

[+/-] Show Full Post...

The Good Doctor, malgré lui

I wonder if AS noticed that, in addition to his recklessly popularizing stylized notions of the gene-race nexus, that his ... er, train, has noticed to.

Posting over at Stormfront, we have a notice of the same article, introduced with the absolutely self-restrained:

"Panic at the JYT", which I assume means "Jew York Times".

I'd post a link, but this is easy enough to find on the Stormfront boards, if you want, so I'm not going to bother.

Jim Fallows, writing in The Atlantic, 1989:

There is, then, nothing in nature that dictates that intelligence be distributed along a bell curve, with the normal proportions of geniuses and morons and people with average IQs. So how can we be sure that intelligence really is distributed that way? In fact, we can't; no one is sure just how it is distributed. The bell curve was invented for analytic convenience, not because anyone believed that it resembled the real, underlying pattern of intelligence.

[+/-] Show Full Post...

"Tancredo… before it's too late."

If you guessed Islamofascism, you'd be right.

THREAT LEVEL - TAKE US TO RHETORICAL DEFCON 4

I think it's time that we start awarding a "Geobbel's Prize" to the politician with the scariest scenarios (Rupert Murdoch should be taxed to fund it?).

Either that, or a new FEC "Terror Alert" scale for candidates, including "Blood Orange", "Really Mean Red", "Cool Blue", "Too Mellow Yellow", and "Moral Surrender Green".

Pam tracks the story here, but you can also get the Tancredo video, a daily threat recap, AND a little threat-o-meter for your blog, at something called the "National Terror Alert Response Center". O my!

[+/-] Show Full Post...

The fine art of the mustache

Daniel Radcliff (a.k.a. "Harry Potter") puts on a mustache for BBC war story.

[+/-] Show Full Post...

Monday, November 12, 2007

Norman Mailer, "Faggot", Dead at 84

We get the last word, Norman.

Meanwhile ...

Everyone, including I, was sort of drawn to Norman's irascibility and unpredictability, but his charm was left to others (several) to find.

One can never really forget him fighting "intellectual pollution" with a gusto that might have frightened the prickly-penned conservatives.

Did he sacrifice too much for his art?

Who knows. It certainly afforded him an enviable license.

(NPR has a good web page.)

[+/-] Show Full Post...

We Look to Our Veterans, Who Alone Know the Folly and Waste of War

Wounded on the way home from Iraq:

When all the great wars were over, no one remembered why they were fought or thought much of how they got started.

I think I read that somewhere. If not, it's good enough.

[+/-] Show Full Post...

Up and Down with Barack

I'm not sure the source of this unevenness, but I really want to know. God knows, I don't have the energy level to carry on in the public eye 24-7.

Walter Shapiro in Salon puts it just right: "The fiery Obama of Saturday night had been replaced on Sunday morning by a replicant, a tepid candidate mostly concerned with avoiding mistakes rather than winning converts." Walter Shapiro in Salon, h/t Robert Stein

(By the way, I continue to agree with Kucinich, who took the media to task about Iran, when I hear Russert again pushing 'red line' issues in a way that makes no sense.)

52 days to Iowa. How the time flies!

[+/-] Show Full Post...

Dems Need to at least Pretend they are a Political Caucus

There has to be more to Democratic politics than playing defense to stay elected and abusing the two-party system by just waiting for the GOP to fail.

A week or so ago, Kos took the party to task. John seem on target that something is wrong with the Dem response.

Going even further back, the political talk shows were asking senior folks why the Democrats didn't caucus as a Party to articulate and push a coherent position on the Iraq war.

I have to admit that there are signs everywhere that the Dems ... aren't talking to each other. Earlier, it seemed to me that the old "Democratic Machine" wasn't fired up, in the sense of getting the message out there.

I don't think it does to mimic the Republicans. They fall in line un-naturally, for one thing.

There may be two problems. One is, as others have remarked, a need to "refresh" the party. If that means a purge in leadership, then ... (I always thought Steny a poor choice).

The other is to recognize that the Republicans, after years of griping about not getting their "message" past the media - despite that Reagan become Teflon and went past the media all the time, for instance - they have become good at (a) message discipline and (b) using talk shows and think tanks to 'control' the debate.

A SAMPLE CASE OF HOW TO USE MESSAGE TO CONFUSE THE ELECTORATE

Here's an example. Ponneru co-opting the message about ending the Nanny Corporation. In brand management, this might be like selling something with a similar name or packaging, in order to confuse people about what they are buying.

Does ANYONE think for a minute that Republicans want to do something about changing "the system" or that Rudy's libertarian rhetoric would ever get effectuated in a GOP administration?

But in recent years, most Republicans have come to believe that our health-care system is dysfunctional because it is employer-based and that this dysfunction has to be attacked at the root.

By the way, if Ponneru really believed that, he'd advocate ending the tax-subsidy, not adding another one, right?

[+/-] Show Full Post...

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Weekend with AS

THE PARTY OF STUPID

"Race Exits", declares AS. Yawn. We've known this for how many years, now?

What does NOT exist is an "explosive debate". That's something that's still largely manufactured by ... those who would like race to mean something that science hasn't said it does, yet.

Maybe the thing to do is to let the Right run around "exploding" and pick up the pieces when the real science comes to town?

Just wait 'till we find out that "race" predisposes some people to believe in God. That knife cuts both ways, you know - whatever science eventually shows, it will not tilt toward the politics that AS has in mind. I'm willing to bet that to 10-1 odds, at least.

Here's another question on 'questionable intelligence'. For 95% of how society functions, what the hell difference does it make whether your IQ is even 10-20 above or below an average? If Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan can be President ... (ooops...was that too "explosive"?).

Maybe AS wants to rescue Conservatives from the 'Party of Stupid' next? Who knows.

But I think we can answer this "nut"shell, fairly easily:

“To say that such differences aren’t real,” Dr. Clark later said in an interview, “is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah blah blah until the band marches by.” -quoted by AS*

Well, to popularize this in advance of fast conclusions from science and without qualification and more is to (a) ignorantly fling open one of the worst Pandora's box that we know of, right?, and one that will not be closed and (b) to provide fertile ground to those who are not "following science" whatsoever on these topics, just prejudice.

This is morally repugnant and negligent, if not criminally so.

And don't tell me that there aren't other "truths" that we don't handle the same way, glossing them over, even in everyday life and in everyday relationships. There are plenty and to focus on "race", as AS has done, is something that speaks to a latent and ugly bias.

*btw, this analogy of the 100-meter race is a clear indication of someone not interested in carefully presenting a scientific viewpoint. It's simply not an accurate portrayal and it is misleading.

LGBT - I, I ... DON'T TRANSCEND MYSELF

AS is popularizing his gross comments about transfolk. Unbelievable. So many fight so hard the uphill battle to get other people not to refer to us by sex-acts, etc., yet AS cannot extend the same courtesy, preferring instead to reduce people to anatomy in order to score "a gain" for his political viewpoint ...

Why is that not surprising? Recently, one gets the sense that it's all about making the right enemies on The Daily Dish. Clearly, transfolk are ... the "right enemies", I guess. What a bizarre and sad world view.

ON THE WAY TO P-TOWN, I NOTICED ...

Similarly for popularizing that "'gay and lesbian' community" doesn't exist, "as such."

Look, I'm not one for over estimating the social cohesion of a group as disparate and diverse as "gay and lesbian", but to seriously doubt its existence?

Gosh, I wonder why AS vacations in Provincetown for years now and writes about "gay culture" (can there be a "culture" without a community?).

And, isn't that just willfully violent to the language, if what he really meant was "gay male culture, not the lesbian experience" as much as any effort to reclaim "queer"?

One doesn't mind looking at other ways to think about things, wondering aloud whether "gender" has more import than "sexual orientation". But what's laughable is the attempt to pretend that that effort somehow escapes "crude, dumb and ideologically loaded". Clearly, it doesn't.

[+/-] Show Full Post...

Late Night Yahoo!'s

It's gonna be a bloodbath in the equity markets tomorrow (Monday), by good guesstimations.

Chineese Authorities raised rates to record level.
Banks are warning about "next shoe", which may include leveraged loans (a.k.a. buyout debt).
Trade may be thin because of the Holiday, potentially increasing volatility.

Asian stock markets are already down 3-4%.

One positive note: OPEC is trying to massage the price of oil, against the backdrop of a week during which technical factors are looking to make a try at topping $100/bbl. Also: The press seem to be downplaying Bush's comments on Friday about Iran that appear to put National Security ahead of economic worries related to oil prices, etc.

[+/-] Show Full Post...