The Failure of the Media in Covering Health Care

A brief article on the health care debate as its covered in the media (spoiler: the media is doing a crap job).

Monday, September 22, 2008

Get Out of the Gutter, Obama

This past week Obama has run a number of sleazy ads and has made some flat out false claims, the most recent of which is telling elderly women in Florida that if McCain had his way their social security would have been in the stock market, which we all know took a little hit last week. Unfortunately this is not true. But I guess that won't stop him from using it to scare old ladies into voting for him.

The sad thing is that Obama doesn't need to be peddling in ambiguities and lies. He has everything on his side. Resorting to these sorts of tactics is beneath the campaign he's promised the American people.

More on Bailout Proposal

Outside The Beltway:

Bernanke says, "There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises." But if there's ever a time to hold strong to fundamental principles, it would seem that this would be it. We're setting precedents that will govern the behavior of the international business community for decades to come. Do we really want to signal that risks are public and rewards are private?

Yglesias:

[B]ad policies get enacted all the time. But we're at a point now where congress is, allegedly, in the hands of progressive leadership. Simply put, if congressional Democrats manage to acquiesce in a plan that spends $700 billion on a bailout while doing nothing for average working people and giving the taxpayer virtually no upside in a way that guarantees that even electoral victory would give an Obama administration no resources with which to implement a progressive domestic agenda in 2009 then everyone's going to have to give serious consideration to becoming a pretty hard-core libertarian.

A Financial Coup d'Etat

Yves Smith on the Treasury bailout proposal:

But here is the truly offensive section of an overreaching piece of legislation:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

This puts the Treasury's actions beyond the rule of law. This is a financial coup d'etat, with the only limitation the $700 billion balance sheet figure. The measure already gives the Treasury the authority not simply to buy dud mortgage paper but other assets as it deems fit. There is no accountability beyond a report (contents undefined) to Congress three months into the program and semiannually thereafter. The Treasury could via incompetence or venality grossly overpay for assets and advisory services, and fail to exclude consultants with conflicts of interest, and there would be no recourse. Given the truly appalling track record of this Administration in its outsourcing, this is not an idle worry.

But far worse is the precedent it sets. This Administration has worked hard to escape any constraints on its actions, not to pursue noble causes, but to curtail civil liberties: Guantanamo, rendition, torture, warrantless wiretaps. It has used the threat of unseen terrorists and a seemingly perpetual war on radical Muslim to justify gutting the Constitution. The Supreme Court, which has been supine on many fronts, has finally started to push back, but would it challenge a bill that sweeps aside judicial review?

Dialing back the scope for just a moment: This proposal would give someone like Phil Gramm control of $700 billion without congressional or judicial oversight. That's scary.

Patriotism Is Not Determined By Taxes

Joe Biden is an idiot sometimes. I do not know how paying mandatory taxes makes one patriotic, nor do I understand how being opposed to paying more taxes makes one less patriotic. However this simplistic thinking reminds me of the current arbiter of patriotism.

On a semi-related note, according to their tax returns the Bidens have given between $120 to $995 to charity annually, or between 0.06 percent and 0.31 percent of their income. The average taxpayer bringing in more than $200,000 makes over $20,000 of charitable contributions, according to the IRS.

Be careful drawing conclusions from this, but it's worth noting nonetheless.

If Not Bush...

Bush and Paulson are urging Congress to act quickly to sign over a blank check to address to collapse. Paul Krugman says No Deal, noting that "there’s no quid pro quo here — nothing that gives taxpayers a stake in the upside, nothing that ensures that the money is used to stabilize the system rather than reward the undeserving."

Matt Yglesias puts it well:

It seems strange to me that they didn’t bolster their rhetoric by providing congressional leaders with a list of all the times congress and the American people decided to swallow their skepticism and give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt, and then everything worked out fine. It’s a really long list, so spelling it out in detail would surely convince a lot of people. Like remember when some folks said Bush’s math was wrong and his tax cuts would lead to large deficits? Idiots! Or those who warned that occupying Iraq might be kind of hard? Morons! If you can’t trust George W. Bush with an unlimited grant of authority then who can you trust?

Friday's Debate

Not that the venue of the debate really matters that much, but since The University of Mississippi is hosting the first one this Friday, I just wanted to comment (it's not often the state gets so much national press for a good reason):

When I was a senior at Ole Miss I had an interview with a magazine editor in New York for a story I was writing and the first two questions out of his mouth when I told him what school I attended were:

"Oh, that's the school where they don't let black people in, right," and "Do you really not wear shoes down there."

There was no sense of sarcasm or joking in his tone. I was baffled by his comments. Because for anyone that has ever attended or even visited the school, you would realize that while Ole Miss is a school that remembers it's past (and tries to learn from it), it is not a school that still lives in that past. And this was 2004, not 1964.

I am not saying the school is perfect by any stretch, but I echo the statement's made by Don Cole in a column that appeared in Mississippi's statewide newspaper The Clarion Ledger:

"People may come to Ole Miss with preconceived notions, but they are going to find a progressive university and good community," said Cole. "Because of my experiences here, I'm insistent on my voice being heard. The difference between 1968 and today is that the University of Mississippi is now also insistent that my voice be heard. That's what I hope these 3,000 reporters realize."

Must Read on Paulson Buyout Plan

Luigi Zingales, a University of Chicago professor in the business school, outlines why the Paulson plan is wrong. His concluding paragraph:

The decisions that will be made this weekend matter not just to the prospects of the U.S. economy in the year to come; they will shape the type of capitalism we will live in for the next fifty years. Do we want to live in a system where profits are private, but losses are socialized? Where taxpayer money is used to prop up failed firms? Or do we want to live in a system where people are held responsible for their decisions, where imprudent behavior is penalized and prudent behavior rewarded? For somebody like me who believes strongly in the free market system, the most serious risk of the current situation is that the interest of few financiers will undermine the fundamental workings of the capitalist system. The time has come to save capitalism from the capitalists.

WTF

At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates.

McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.

This is from the New York Times, not, as you might have assumed, The Onion.

I'm almost at a loss for words. It's not Palin's debate experience that has McCain advisers concerned -- that reason is complete bullshit -- it's her lack of any knowledge about anything whatsoever. A debate that (godforbid) allowed the candidates to have a little breathing room with their answers and exchanges would leave her exposed as the identity-politics fraud she is. That was their concern. And to that we should all say: you fucking kidding me? This is a sad day for American democracy.

Dollar May Get Crushed by Bailout

Please please please please please let the Democrats in Congress grow a pair of balls. Groceries are already too expensive, but think of how bad things could get if the dollar gets demolished. Thank goodness I don't drive.

Bloomberg:

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan to end the rout in U.S. financial markets may derail the dollar's three-month rally as investors weigh the costs of the rescue.

The combination of spending $700 billion on soured mortgage-related assets and providing $400 billion to guarantee money-market mutual funds will boost U.S. borrowing as much as $1 trillion, according to Barclays Capital interest-rate strategist Michael Pond in New York. While the rescue may restore investor confidence to battered financial markets, traders will again focus on the twin budget and current-account deficits and negative real U.S. interest rates.

``As we get to the other side of this, the dollar will get crushed,'' said John Taylor, chairman of New York-based International Foreign Exchange Concepts Inc., the world's biggest currency hedge-fund firm, which manages about $15 billion.

Olbermann Special Comment

The Libertarian Case For Obama

Points 1, 3-4, and 6 are the primary reasons I am voting for Obama. And the first sentence of the article contains a sentiment that I hope will catch on with independent voters over the next month. The last eight years of Republican rule have been absolutely foreign to those of us who value small government and individual liberties.

Letter To The NYT

From today's NYT:

Dear Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson:

My student loans are too big and it is hurting the economy. Can I have a bailout, please? I need $92,000.

Thanks.

Nathan Kottke

Here's why this won't work. First, the loan is way too small. Second, investing in higher education is oftentimes highly worthwhile. Nathan needed to take out much, much, much more money and then invest it in worthless assets in order for the government to come to his rescue.

The Keating Five

From TPM:

You would never know it from watching the news, but one of the candidates in this race happens to have been previously implicated in a national scandal involving pressuring regulators to back off of a bank making risky moves with its assets, leading to disaster for investors and an expensive government bailout.

Is there a good reason why no one is mentioning John McCain's Keating Five membership in any of these arguments over who is on the side of regulating risky private banking practices?

Obviously this writer is not aware that John McCain was once a prisoner of war.

A Start

Robert Reich's proposal for the bailout is a good start.

Linking, Newspapers, The Underground

A smart take on the importance of linking and the failure of newspapers to adapt their web strategy to take advantage of the web.

This is, in a nutshell, the primary driving force behind the Underground: to disseminate the stuff that interests us. What's amazing about Drudge is that he does it alone. Since I found his site about five years ago I always wondered when there would be a liberal answer. There is a gap in the market for a website that functions as the ultimate in tailored RSS for the liberal crowd. Sites like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo are nice, but I'd be really happy with a site that just provided me with a constant stream of updated links to stories that interest me.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Packing up

According to USA Today:

Barack Obama, who has deployed more than 50 staffers in North Dakota in an attempt to become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since 1964, is pulling out.

An Obama spokeswoman, Amy Brundage, confirmed Sunday that the campaign's North Dakota staffers were being sent to Minnesota and Wisconsin, where recent polls have shown a tight race between Obama and Republican John McCain.

She declined to say how many campaign workers were being shifted, but other Democratic activists put the number at more than 50. Obama has opened 11 North Dakota campaign offices and run television advertising in the state, which is unusual for a Democratic presidential candidate.

Palin Pushes Florida Undecideds Towards Obama

From the St. Petersburg Times:

Five weeks ago, the St. Petersburg Times convened a group of Tampa Bay voters who were undecided about the presidential election. Their strong distrust of Barack Obama suggested it was a group ripe for John McCain to win over.

Not anymore. The group has swung dramatically, if unenthusiastically, toward Democrat Obama. Most of them this week cited the same reason: Sarah Palin.

Palin, who makes her first Florida campaign stop Sunday in a Republican stronghold in north-central Florida, has generated enthusiasm among conservatives. But at least with this randomly selected group of swing voters, she appears to be an obstacle to McCain's winning over disillusioned Democrats or moderates.

"That was almost insulting," Democrat Rhonda Laris of Temple Terrace, another strong Clinton backer skeptical of Obama, said of the Palin pick. "Do they think we're really stupid? … I'm definitely leaning toward the Democratic side now. Sarah Palin scares ... me."

Touching

On 60 Minutes there was a moment during Obama's segment showing him at a rally in Nevada. After the rally Obama was continuing his interview when a woman in the crowd called for him. He finishes the interview and goes to look for her. When he finds her she says that her husband of 70 years, who just passed away, was hoping to live long enough to vote for Obama.

And I told Congress, "Thanks but no thanks..."

Forget the Bridge to Nowhere. It seems Palin's other widely touted project, that infamous natural-gas pipeline, might not happen either. From Newsweek:

The principal achievement of Sarah Palin's term as Alaska's governor, a natural-gas pipeline project backed by $500 million in state tax money, might never be built unless Canadian authorities can strike a deal with some of the country's angry Indian tribes. Approximately half of the proposed pipeline would run through Canada; native tribes who live along its route complain they haven't been consulted about it and are threatening to sue unless they are compensated. R

In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Patrick Galvin, Palin's revenue commissioner, conceded that "there are risks associated with this project … Nobody has said that this project is absolutely going to happen, guaranteed."

I love politics...

but this weekend I love baseball more:

Drive, baby, drive

Yesterday, Newsweek decided to take the "How many houses do you own?" question one step further by investigating how many cars each candidate owns.

The tally?

John McCain: 13
Barack Obama: 1

Let it be known that by posting this I am hardly criticizing John and Cindy McCain's financial success, but I do think this is fascinating, just like I thought Cindy McCain's $300,000 outfit at the RNC was fascinating, too.

McCain: Unpresidential

You know it's bad for McCain when, this morning on ABC's The Week, conservative columnist George Will declared his actions last week "unpresidential."

"I suppose the McCain campaign's hope is that when there's a big crisis, people will go for age and experience," said Will. "The question is, who in this crisis looked more presidential, calm and un-flustered? It wasn't John McCain who, as usual, substituting vehemence for coherence, said 'let's fire somebody.' And picked one of the most experienced and conservative people in the administration, Chris Cox, and for no apparent reason... It was un-presidential behavior by a presidential candidate."

Watch the clip here.

Religious Prejudice as Proxy for Racial Prejudice

Kristof writes a compelling argument about whether religious prejudice -- specifically the circulating rumors about Obama being Muslim, the anti-Christ, etc. -- is now a proxy for racial prejudice.

Dark Matter!

There is certainly a boatload of inappropriate jokes to make about dark matter and dim galaxies in reference to the presidential election (OK, there might only be one joke and it might suck), but this is no joking matter: Scientists have discovered the dimmest galaxy in the universe and they posit it's filled with dark matter. Woo hoo!