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A difficult announcement for me to make. .... 12:15 A.M.
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Reihan Salam writes, of the secretive liberal JournoList:
I only wish right-of-center types could form something equally fun and stimulating and influential ...
I think the Right is ... well, here's what I think. ... Esprit d'escalier: A point I should have made in my debate with Bob Wright, who argues that there have always been private salon-style discussions. True. But the Web can take things that were once benign and render them problematic (and vice versa, I guess). For example, Wright himself frequently argues that the internet has made it easier for angry people with a common, minority grievance to find each other and form groups that can turn to terrorism. There have been angry people for a long time, and there have been angry people who have turned to violence, but the technology of the Web makes a qualitative difference, just as advances in fertility technology can make the qualitative difference between a woman with a long-sought child and Octomom. It's true that there have been "tongs" and salons and other off-the-record discussions for a long time, but the Web might enable an increase in scale so that they become something less benign that actually inhibits productive public debate. Or not! But it's not enough to say "well, this is just an Internet version of something that existed pre-Web." ... 12:10 A.M.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Most interesting thing I've read on the auto bailout today: Why is it so difficult to get GM's bondholders to take a "haircut"? Tom Maguire explains. It turns out there is a big potential free rider problem: If you hold out, while all the other bondholders settle, you can win big. And it has been done. Recently. To Obama. Hence, the disinclination of GM bondholders to cave, pre-bankruptcy. .... Obama would have to put on a huge show of coldbloodedness and credibly threaten bankruptcy in order to now have a chance at intimidating bond holdouts. And, gee, that's just what we've seen. ... P.S.: Maybe everyone already knows this. I didn't. ... P.P.S.: Extracting concessions from unions, in contrast, is relatively straightforward: Once the union agrees to a giveback, the concession binds all of its members. Individual workers can't hold out for their old deal. (This isn't to say that extracting concessions where there is no union--make that imposing concessions--isn't easier still.) .... 5:45 P.M.
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Monday, March 30, 2009
Jon Chait is surely correct that if Obamas presidency fails it's the Congressional Democrats who'll be responsible. ... But a) Chait writes as if the only Democrats who might put parochial interests over national and party interests are Kent Conrad-style Senate moderates-- as opposed to, say, hard-core Dems who'll prevent Obama from killing ineffective liberal programs (and from being able to afford effective ones, because they insist on paying top-dollar "Davis-Bacon" wages). There are hacks on the left and right as well as in the center. ... b) Chait declares that Dems who want to "rein in deficits" are not necessarily pursuing "the national interest." In the long run? Really? ... c) He says Obama's budget "represents a once-in-a-generation chance for the Democratic Party to reshape the priorities of the federal government." So if Obama doesn't get his health care reserve fund passed this year, we have to give up on health care for a generation? Hype, I say. ... d) Chastising Dem dissenters, Chait claims "Republicans did not denounce Bush for squandering a budget surplus to benefit the rich." John McCain might be surprised to hear that. ... e) Chait says Bill Clinton "saw the core of his domestic agenda come to ruin," adding
The one factor within the Democrats' control is whether their constituents see Obama as a strong leader taking action, like Roosevelt or Kennedy, or a floundering weakling, like Carter or first-term Clinton.
I remember Clinton's first term as being rather effective--he passed welfare reform, NAFTA, and put the budget on a path to balance. Second term? Well, there was the "race initiative"! And he managed to preserve the surplus. Chait only says Clinton failed to pass "the core of his domestic agenda" because he doesn't like the idea that ending "welfare as we know it" was at the core of Clinton's domestic agenda. But Clinton campaigned on it at least as much as on health care. Marty Peretz could fill Chait in. ... 10:11 P.M.
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Left Dem Robert Borosage wrote about labor's "card check" bill earlier this month:
[The bill] will be introduced into the House in the next couple weeks, where passage is guaranteed. The real donnybrook will be in the Senate where it has strong majority support but must overcome efforts by a conservative minority to block the vote with a filibuster. [E.A.]
"Conservative minority." Hmmm. Not so sure about that. Does "card check" as written even have a simple majority in the Senate anymore? Opponents seem to have 41 solid votes, and some 17 Democrats are apparently wavering. All it would take would be 10 of them to make those pushing the bill a "liberal minority." It reminds me of the dynamic surrounding "comprehensive immigration reform"--where we were also told that a conservative minority was blocking the bill, but where, on the crucial cloture vote, that "minority" turned out to have 53 votes (versus 46 for proponents).
There's only one way to find out for sure, of course. I'm not that curious. ... 9:49 P.M.
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Anatomy of a succesful blog post: Matthew Yglesias finds a tiny, tiny little point to make ("[a]lmost nobody" watches daytime cable news, but "people who work professionally in the political arena" do) that lets him plug a banal quote from his boss, John Podesta. ... 9:23 P.M.
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Twitter Beats Big Labor? Did a loose coalition of low-budget social networkers and tweeters defeat Measure B--a plan by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the mighty International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (which seems to be running the city's Department of Water and Power) to create union jobs putting up solar panels all over the city? That's what L.A. Weekly's Daniel Heimpel claims. ... I can see some holes in his argument--Measure B was also opposed by the L.A. Times and by at least one prominent pol (Controller Laura Chick). And ballot measures usually have a tough road. Still! If it didn't happen this election, it will happen soon enough. ... 9:10 P.M
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Rick Wagoner = Ngo Dinh Diem? Discuss. After visibly defenstrating GM CEO RIck Wagoner, and moving to replace the board of directors, won't Obama now "own" the GM problem? If the company shuts down in the near future, costing tens of thousands of blue collar jobs, it will be under executives implicitly or explicitly chosen by Obama. It will be Obama's failure, not simply GM's failure, no? A public sector failure, not just a business failure. Doesn't that make it harder, not easier, for the administration to walk away and force the company into bankruptcy (if, for example, the company's plans for "viability" continue to fall short after the new 60-day deadline)? And doesn't that, in turn, make extracting the necessary concessions (by threatening bankruptcy) more difficult as well? ... This wouldn't be the first time that financier-turned-autoczar Steven Rattner's tendency to talk to the press--and maybe emphasize his own role--proved counterproductive. ... 2:23 A.M.
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Why are L.A.'s charter schools doing better at weathering hard budgetary times--without cutting teachers--than L.A.'s regular schools?
Free from rigid union contracts, able to make spending decisions at the school-site level and continuing to see enrollment growth, charter schools can run their campuses like small businesses. At a time when the Los Angeles Unified School District faces layoffs of some 8,500 people and is dismantling popular programs to cut costs, some charter schools are actually hiring teachers. (L.A. Daily News)
2:12 A.M.
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kf Does Have Some Enemies Left! Raines is gone. Bangle is gone. But I'd forgotten about "visionary" CNN president Jon Klein, who righteously killed Crossfire in order to bring us ...what was it again ... storytelling? ... emo? ... Glenn Beck? ... it's hard to keep track. Under Klein's leadership the network has now dropped to third place in prime time, behind previously hapless MSNBC, a development Klein madly and hilariously spins here. ("The fact that one network may have eked out a slight edge in one small slice of the overall business really doesn't say much of anything.") ... [You forgot Jeffrey Toobin. Wasn't Toobin an enemy?--ed. Yeah, but there's nothing happening with him.] ... 1:46 A.M
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Jonathan Cohn seems right in what I take to be his point here, which is that the key to selling universal health insurance isn't stressing the need to cover the"uninsured," but the need to save the insured (and those who can afford insurance) from the maddening hunt for a policy that won't screw them when they need it, or if they switch jobs. Savings in administrative costs, the virtue stressed by Cohn in this latest post, seem like the least of it, especially if they only amount to $300 a year. ... 1:23 A.M.
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Friday, March 27, 2009
Really, I can monetize anytime I want to. You don't believe me? ... 9:21 P.M.
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Let me guess: Both are instantly likeable but unjustly denigrated precisely because of their popularity? ... 9:23 P.M.
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Auto czarito Steven Rattner's $245 million investiment in Maxim, Blender and Stuff isn't looking very good these days. Stuff was closed long ago. Now Blender's print edition has been shut down. Luckily, Rattner is one step ahead of the posse now busy restructuring the American automobile industry. ... 9:52 P.M.
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Employee Free Choice On the Move! Now Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein is waffling on "card check." Look for Marc Ambinder's note on how this only better positions the anti-secret-ballot legislation for 2012! ... 11:17 P.M.
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I was worried that anti-card-check lobbyists had made the horrible mistake of killing it quickly, before they'd put their kids through college. But no, there is still talk of a compromise that's damaging to their business clients. Sen. Harkin seems to be trying to use the Starbucks Plan as a push-off point in order to give labor an incremental victory. Faughnan speculates Harkin's trying to save some of the (hated by business) arbitration provisions. As usual. Jennifer Rubin isn't buying the threat. ... P.S.: What, exactly, did labor spinners gain by their now-discredited braggadocio ("100% confident")? ... 11:55 P.M.
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The Moral Arbitratiness of the Strike Power: Stuart Taylor clarifies why the arbitration provisions of the "card check" bill are actually a fairly powerful repudiation of Wagner Act unionism:
While the National Labor Relations Act has required employers for more than 60 years to bargain in good faith, it has never authorized officials to impose contract terms or order employers to make concessions -- and for good reason. ...
The premise of U.S. labor law has long been that the government should not take sides in labor disputes or impose terms on recalcitrant employers, but rather should guarantee the right to strike so that unions can use whatever raw economic power they possess to force concessions
Right. The fundamental idea behind the Wagner Act was that wages would be set by the economic contest between employers and, on the other side, workers exercising their power to strike. If an employer stiffed a union, then the union would respond by walking out and--if the strike was successful--forcing the employer to cut a deal. Unions were proud, self-sufficient actors that could look after themselves. The idea behind the arbitration provisions in "card check" is that the strike power is not enough to guarantee economic justice--the government has to step in and set wages. This shift has subversive implications that go way beyond union organizing campaigns--implications defenders of unionism, in particular, may find disturbing: 1) If the strike power doesn't correlate with economic justice--e.g., some unions routinely don't have enough power to achieve the wages they deserve--isn't it possible that the strike weapon gives some unions more power than is justified? Transit worker unions and drawbridge operators come to mind, if not teachers and hospital workers. 2) If the government can come in and set fair wages, who needs strikes? Who needs unions? Why not eliminate the middleman and just go straight to arbitration? ... 11:59 P.M.
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Isn't now the time to start a daily "paper" covering the West Side of Los Angeles? Over a million people live here. Affluent people. People semi-obsessively concerned with local issues like crime, traffic, development, city and state politics and ill-served by the magisterial L.A. Times in far off downtown, which has to cover all of Southern California and seems to think paying attention to the West Side is somehow elitist, if not racist. ... You could hire five reporters--cheap, these days--and you'd have about four more reporters covering the area than the Times has. If they're the right reporters it shouldn't be that difficult to steal the Times' richest readers and the advertisers who want to reach them. (Many of those readers already get the New York Times for its national and international coverage. You would be the local supplement.) ... P.S.: If the LAT loses the West Side--well, let's note that the paper is already in what looks like a death spiral. Here's an opportunity to put it out of its misery, quickly, and build something in its place--without the LAT's toxic "legacy asset" of stuffiness.... We want to know whom Mayor Villaraigosa is dating, and we want to see her picture. And if John Edwards visits his mistress at the Beverly Hilton and gets chased into a bathroom by National Enquirer reporters--hey, you know, maybe that's a story! (The LAT didn't think so.) By covering politics in a way that got at least a few hundred thousand readers to pay attention, you could take the first, big step toward changing the apathetic culture of Southern California (the culture that lets Democratic interest groups fill the void and call the shots). ...
Anyone with some money want to be our Graham? Wouldn't take all that much money. ... Not you, Burkle! ... Mr. Anschutz? How about it? You wouldn't have to use swear words. Honest. ... Or Gov. Schwarzenegger. Got something better to do when you leave office? .. .
Update: LAT City editor Shelby Grad points to the paper's "new web page and blog devoted to Westside News." It's less than compelling. ... 8:21 P.M.
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Thursday, March 26, 2009
Michael Calderone's article on the large, secretive liberal media email group JournoList sparked a lot of debate--some of it in this space--on whether this group is a healthy development for coverage of politics. The debate was necessarily speculative because actual JournoList discussions remained secret. But with more than 300 members of this club, virtually all of them with easy access to the media, did you really think a JournoList thread wouldn't leak? People are rightly interested in learning what goes on behind the scenes at powerful institutions--or wannabe powerful institutions--whose power derives precisely from their decision to exclude the public.
Kausfiles has obtained a copy of one JournoList discussion, focusing on New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz (for whom I once worked.) This is not a parody! It's the real thing. I don't know whether or not it is representative. I've edited it only to remove potentially defamatory passages--those cuts are marked--and left out various boilerplate links and commands embedded in the thread, such as "Print" and "Report this message." ... I won't add my own commentary, at least for now. Find your own lede! ... Reminder to JournoList organizer E. Klein, who likes to take it private: All communications are on the record. ...
*************************************
From: Chris Hayes <christopherlha...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:43:51 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 1:43 pm Subject: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Yglesias points out on his Twitter feed that Peretz "has ethnic
dislikes beyond arabs"
I know this is a tiresome, but this kind of explicit racism is really,
really, really fucked. And it's useful to keep pointing that out
money quote:
"Well, I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations,
not because the U.S. had done anything specifically wrong to our
southern neighbor but because a (now not quite so) wealthy country has
as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic
deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government,
anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores,
Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic
counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict. Then,
there is the Mexican diaspora in America, hard-working and patriotic
but mired in its untold numbers of illegals, about whom no one can
talk with candor."
'http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2009/03/23/no-
special-envoy-no-crisis.aspx
From: Matthew Yglesias <mygles...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:00:31 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:00 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist I also read on TNR.com today that Jonah Goldberg, who believes that everyone
on this list is a fascist, is "good-humored," while Keith Olbermann's work
is best analogized to Glenn Beck or Michael Savage.
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Chris Hayes <christopherlha...@gmail.com>wrote:
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From: Matt Duss <mattd...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:13:54 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:13 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist I anxiously await the explanation of how Peretz's obvious racism is
really just an argument about "culture."
On Mar 24, 2:00 pm, Matthew Yglesias <mygles...@gmail.com> wrote:
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From: Clay <ris...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:14:57 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:14 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Funny -- under Peter B. (no idea whether this extends to Frank, though
I imagine so) using the term "illegals" was verboten, for obvious
reasons. I guess Marty didn't get the memo. Or, well, you know.
Also, and this is slightly orthogonal to the topic, but Marty's post
demonstrates the accidental danger in praising Latin American
immigrants as driven and hard-working. Logically it makes sense, but
it's also easy for people to draw the false conclusion that anyone who
doesn't immigrate is therefore lazy and stupid.
On Mar 24, 2:00 pm, Matthew Yglesias <mygles...@gmail.com> wrote:
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From: "newdon...@gmail.com" <newdon...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:18:30 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:18 pm
Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist
To be fair, Cottle was writing about self-styled Pundit Types, not
making comparative judgments of worth. I actually don't think
Olbermann much ever achieves the heights of hysteria routinely
maintained by the well-named Savage, but the pretence by some of us
admirers of Keith that he's a paragon of reasoned discourse is a bit
much, too.
Ed Kilgore
www.thedemocraticstrategist.org
From: Jonathan Chait <jch...@tnr.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:27:59 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:27 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Perhaps, if his work is going to be brought up here 2 or 3 times a
week, he should be invited on the list. Or is the point of this to
create a forum where certain people can be criticized (or, more
precisely, called names) without the criticizer having to fear a
response? I do recall Eric Alterman going after Eve Fairbanks, and
then -- when Eve mounted a defense -- confessing that he didn't know
she was on the list, and only criticized her because he thought he was
speaking behind her back.
Is Michelle Cottle on this list? She's criticized less frequently
here, and I don't think this sort of thing interests her, but her
presence would definitely improve the list. There seems to be a junior
high quality to this list with regard to TNR, where if you're not on
it you get sniped at constantly, but if you are on it you're mostly
safe.
On Mar 24, 2:18 pm, "newdon...@gmail.com" <newdon...@gmail.com> wrote:
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>
From: Jesse Singal <jesse.sin...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:41:15 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:41 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Everyone I know who likes Olbermann also acknowledge that he is egomaniacal
and has a penchant for hysterical drama. The main difference, which is
glaringly left out by anyone who conflates him with the Savages and
O'Reillys of the world, is that Olbermann doesn't tend to, you know, lie
about stuff regularly.
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 2:18 PM, newdon...@gmail.com <newdon...@gmail.com>wrote:
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From: Michael Cohen <speechbo...@yahoo.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:51:25 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:51 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Personally, I find Olbermann insufferable, but I'm not sure I buy the comparison. Michael Savage is a complete nut job and if he wasn't on radio he would probably be standing on a street corner with a bullhorn bitching about socialism.
--- On Tue, 3/24/09, Jesse Singal <jesse.sin...@gmail.com> wrote:
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From: Isaac Chotiner <ichoti...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:55:59 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:55 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist A friend of mine who works for Pelosi and has been active in California
politics for a long time claims that Savage's bizarre, racist, homophobic
schtick is a complete act. He knows Savage a bit--or at least did when
Savage started his show. This obviously does not excuse it in any way, but
for Savage listeners it is interesting to think about.
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Michael Cohen <speechbo...@yahoo.com>wrote:
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From: Eric Alterman <era00...@aol.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:56:38 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:56 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Quit lying about my record, Jonathan Chait.
Or at least check the archives before descinding into Kirchickism.
What I posted about Eve was an article I PUBLISHED. It could hardly
have been going behind her back to PUBLISH an article, could it? What
I explained when you last leveled this false accusation ... [SNIP] ... was the fact that had I known Eve was on the list, I
would not have posted it here, even though it was relevant to the
discussion at hand, because a) I had no wish to hurt the feelings of
someone I had never met, and b) this is no less important, I respect
the value of civility on this list. As you well know, there are plenty
of attacks going on between yourself, Matt, Ezra, Spencer, and myself
that do not make it onto this list because we respect the importance
of civility here. Or at least we did....
I expect Ezra will want to intervene here, but please do feel free to
forward our exchange to Marty. I can only imagine how proud he'd
be....
n Mar 24, 2:51 pm, Michael Cohen <speechbo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
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From: Chris Hayes <christopherlha...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:57:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist There's a lot of people on this list routinely criticized who are not
on it, Jon. That said, I'm more than happy to call Marty Peretz a
racist to his (electronic) face.
-c
On Mar 24, 6:51 pm, Michael Cohen <speechbo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Katha Pollitt <katha.poll...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:56:57 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:56 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Michael Savage told a gay caller he should get AIDS and die. He is a
bigoted crazy person. (or is it all an act?) Olbermann is funny
sometimes but insufferable. He was really unfair during the primaries
-- like calling Katie Couric the worst person in the world when she
made some quite mild remark I think about sexism in the media (?).
On Mar 24, 2009, at 2:51 PM, Michael Cohen wrote:
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From: Alyssa Rosenberg <alyssa.rosenb...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:06:27 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:06 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist I'm not about to speak to the question of who should or shouldn't be on this
list. But I agree with Jon that the tendency to lapse into name-calling, or
making broad assumptions about people who aren't on this list, seems at
minimum like it's not the best use of our time, and at worst, unworthy of
this very smart, very funny community. It bothered me when folks where
making totally unsubstantiated comments about [REDACTED!--mk]'s sex life, and
it bothers me when folks make [REDACTED] jokes. To be clear, I'm
totally open to legitimate commentary on the substance of anyone's argument,
and people should get smacked down if they lie, if they get things wrong,
etc. I think analyzing Peretz's writing about Mexicans, or Palestinians, or
whoever, is totally fair game. But saying that [REDACTED] clearly must not have a
girlfriend, or speculating about who [REDACTED] gets turned down by sexually are
not arguments. We wouldn't take similar statements remotely seriously if
they were made by conservatives about anyone on this list.
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From: Clay <ris...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:10:49 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:10 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Heh. That reminds me of a very similar meme going around in the
mid-1990s about Rush Limbaugh, that he was actually a pretty liberal
guy who had created this bloviating ass to make conservatives look
bad. The general conclusion was that, a) what does it matter, since he
never reveals himself, and b) he's clearly got an audience, and so
he's doing a lot of bad even if he is really, deep down, a "good" guy.
The same would apply to Savage, methinks. If it's an act, I'd say that
makes him all the worse of a human being.
On Mar 24, 2:56 pm, Katha Pollitt <katha.poll...@gmail.com> wrote:
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From: Rick Perlstein <Perlst...@aol.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:18:09 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:18 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist My judgment would be that, by the evidence on the record, Michael
Savage is far too deranged and possesses far too little self-control
to do anything as an "act."
To wit-- ...[REDACTED]
From: Jesse Singal <jesse.sin...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:23:59 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:23 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Then there's Savage's work as a fiction writer, mentioned in this great *
Salon*<http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/03/05/savage/print.html>piece
that runs down his strange biography:
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> This maniacal tendency, and the roiling emotions that fueled it, were laid
> bare in "Vital Signs," Michael Weiner's first and only book of fiction,
> published in 1983. A collection of confessional, stream-of-consciousness
> stories, it follows the exploits of Samuel Trueblood, who just happens to be
> a 40-ish New York Jew, an herbalist and writer with a tumultuous personal
> life, a substantial assortment of inner demons and a bit of a Napoleon
> complex. "I am physically not tall, but my eyes burn with fire," he states.
> "Two black fires of Hell." Trueblood narrates a series of misadventures,
> from procuring an illegal backroom abortion for his fianc?e to beating the
> stuffing out of an abusive cop.
> Trueblood describes his life as one long search for inner peace. He blames
> much of his discontent on his "childhood beneath tyranny," during which he
> was cowed by his bullying father. Trueblood describes how his father mocked
> him with "brutal jokes and chides, 'gentle' kidding: 'You're not a fag, are
> you Sam?' the little man would say each time the boy dared wear a colorful
> shirt or flashy trousers." Unable to shake his dead father's disapproving
> influence, the adult Samuel is tortured by feelings of weakness and
> inadequacy. "I am filled with fears," he admits, "nearly all the time
> feeling I am about to become totally insane."
> Even after moving to mellow Marin County, becoming a successful herbalist
> and starting a family, Trueblood remains plagued by his "underlying
> sadness." Not even trusty passionfruit tea can bring him off this bummer. In
> one passage, he almost loses it in front of his wife and two young children:
> "Inner voice screaming at me for years, first rational, then crazy, telling
> me to do mad things. Every form of relief tried, painting, psychotherapy,
> running, diet, vitamins, etc., etc. Almost uncontrollable now. Impulses to
> stab children, strangers, wife, self with scissors."
> Eventually, Trueblood seeks solace in chasing skirts. (Though he admits to
> being drawn to "masculine beauty," he confides that "I choose to override my
> desires for men when they swell in me, waiting out the passions like a
> storm, below decks.") While his wife stays home with the kids, he beds a
> young "cockswell" with a "dykish haircut" and skin "[s]ofter than that
> Northern Indian prostitute in Fiji whose covering was as soft as that of my
> own penis." And so it goes for another 50 pages.
When it comes to someone has insanely homophobic as Savage, I have no
problem saying that the dude's [REDACTED], and that this may explain some
of his more execrable paroxysms about homosexuality.
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From: Jonathan Chait <jch...@tnr.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:25:29 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:25 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist I have no idea how to retrieve the echange in question, but if
somebody knows how, please do.
I'll concede the point that you published the critique of Eve on your
blog. However, trying not to be catty here, not everybody here may
read your blog on a daily basis. The exchange was about your decision
to repost the critique of Eve here on the list. You did it, she
replied, and then you said you wouldn't have done it if you had known
she was on the list. You viewed this as etiquette, I viewed it as
something different.
... [SNIP] ...
From: Brad DeLong <brad.del...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:35:09 -0700 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:35 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Jonathan Chait <jch...@tnr.com> wrote:
> There seems to be a junior
> high quality to this list with regard to TNR, where if you're not on
> it you get sniped at constantly, but if you are on it you're mostly
> safe.
I can fix that!!
From: Jonathan Chait <jch...@tnr.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:39:45 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:39 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Yes, your posts have more of a prison quality to them. I find it
preferable, though still well short of ideal.
On Mar 24, 3:35 pm, Brad DeLong <brad.del...@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Alex Rossmiller <alexrossmil...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:41:40 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:41 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist *sigh*
As the resident archive-checker, I link this only in the interest of
stopping the speculative element of the debate -- you should be able to see
the original thread
here<http://groups.google.com/group/journolist/browse_thread/thread/d9acdf0bacb38037/fed32501975cf602?lnk=gst&q=alterman+eve#fed32501975cf602>
.
But really, the most notable quote from that conversation was from Rich
Byrne: "Do we need a separate TNR-list? Just asking." (Though second is
probably this, from Spencer: "Jon Chait is to TNR as Ari Fleischer is to
George Bush.")
Civility in action!
From: Eric Alterman <era00...@aol.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:42:56 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:42 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Wrong again, Mr. Chait, on both points:
I did not publish on my blog but on the front page of the Center for
American Progress website where I write a weekly column. Not everybody
reads that either, but then again but more people read it than read
The New Republic, if I am not mistaken. (See "The State of the News
Media: Magazines: Opinion Titles.")
Second, ... [SNIP] ....
From: Jeet <jeeth...@yahoo.ca> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:46:48 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:46 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Is there a tendency on this list to lash out against TNR too much?
Maybe.
But the core of the matter is: TNR is a really first rate liberal
magazine, especially in the last decade or so, so it's disappointing
that also have to run crude ethnocentric articles by Peretz.
When The American Spectator or National Review run frothing-at-the-
mouth xenophobic articles, no one here notices because we don't expect
any better from them. But TNR is one of the two or three most
important liberal magazines in American history, so it matters what
they publish.
On Mar 24, 1:41 pm, Alex Rossmiller <alexrossmil...@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Ezra Klein <ezra.kl...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:08:11 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 4:08 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Jon -- you and Eric should take this off-list.
I'd love to have Michelle Cottle on the list. My worry with Marty is that he
wouldn't respect the off-the-record nature of the discourse when it ceased
to suit him.
From: Brad DeLong <brad.del...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:08:40 -0700 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 4:08 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Jeet <jeeth...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> Is there a tendency on this list to lash out against TNR too much?
> Maybe.
As someone who was working hard for the Clinton Administration to improve
American health care when Betsy McCaughey came over the transome from a
magazine whose editor "knew its flaws" but wanted to "provoke," I have an
answer to Jeet's question.
My answer is: "No."
Now if there were a rotating New Republic staffer outside on the street 24/7
saying: "Woe to an iniquitous generation. We published Betsy McCaughey! For
our sins the One Who Is has turned Her face from us forever!!" I might think
that they had learned their lesson.
Or if Chait and all other TNR staffers were to adopt that as their .sig
file...
But in this fallen world? In which... ahem... Marc Ambinder holds up Andrew
Sullivan as a sterling example of intellectual integrity?
Nope.
Brad DeLong
From: Eric Alterman <era00...@aol.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:13:39 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 4:13 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist For the record boss man, I'm done. I merely responded to a series of
false accusations made about me by Mr. Chait. You'll note that I
manfully (and womanfully) resisted the urge to join in the Marty
bashing until lied about above...
*************************************
[And so it ends. ... Or does it? ... Stay tuned!--mk] 3:21 P.M.
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Wednesday, March 25, 2009
One in 50 Children Homeless? Here's a question from President Obama's press conference, asked by Kevin Chappell of Ebony--
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. A recent report found that, as a result of the economic downturn, 1 in 50 children are now homeless in America. With shelters at full capacity, tent cities are sprouting up across the country.
In passing your stimulus package, you said that help was on the way. But what would you say to these families, especially children, who are sleeping under bridges and in tents across the country? [E.A.]
This is one of those statistical assertions that you know is BS before you even set out to show it's BS. If you just live here and go around with your eyes open you know it's BS. Sure enough, it's BS! Chappell's question is based on this study by an anti-homelessness advocacy group with every incentive to maximize the estimate of the problem. 1) The report apparently counts all people who are "homeless" even one night over the course of a year. That's very different from saying that one-in-50 are homeless at the same time--e.g., "now." 2) More significantly, the report counts as "homeless" families who've "doubled up"--e.g., moved in with relatives--apparently on the grounds that while these children in these families do have a home, they don't have "a home of their own." That's not what most people mean by homeless, and not the image Chappell conjures (tent cities, sleeping under bridges). Will I be "homeless" if Fire Mickey Kaus succeeds and I have to move in with my brother's family? Don't answer that. ... The study also counts families living in motels and trailer parks--again, lousy living arrangements, maybe, but not what we usually mean by "homeless."
P.S.: "Doubling up" counts for fully 56% of the "1 in 50" estimate. (See page 9). "Hotels/motels" counts for 7%. In other words, right off the bat almost two-thirds of the study's once-a-year "homelessness" isn't actually homelessness. ...
Update: Taranto, who called out the "National Center on Family Homelessness" weeks ago, has more detail. It turns out they also count children in "substandard housing"! The numbers may also have been inflated the year chosen, which coincided with Hurrican Katrina. As Taranto notes, if you "spent a single night ... staying with cousins in Houston or Shreveport as a result of Katrina" you counted as "homeless." ...
P.P.S.: This study uses every trick in the liberal antipoverty advocacy playbook: Focus on children, not adults? Check. Gin up inflated numbers? Check. Include state-by-state breakdowns to interest local reporters? Check. Appealing pictures of tots? Check. Hyped-up language? ("A storm is moving across the country ... ") Check. Gloss over all the moral and policy dilemmas involved in giving cash to single mothers who aren't working? Check. It's a formula well-designed to get lots of mentions in the MSM. But it works less well in terms of actually getting policies enacted. You're not going to bowl over the American political system by engineering a wave of naive, guilt-tripping compassion. Did Marion Wright Edelman prevent welfare reform? I don't quite understand it. It's not as if homelessness isn't a real problem. An organization that gained a reputation for not hyping it might have real impact on legislation. But that doesn't seem to be what the world of non-profit grantsmanship rewards. ... 3:46 A.M.
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Twitterola? Driving in Texas recently, I heard two radio DJ's bantering with at least the pretense of spontaneity about the joys of forming a local twitter-based group. One said it was great. The other said it sounded great! No way this is actually spontaneous--it must be some kind of marketing campaign, no? Presumably a paid (or bartered) marketing campaign. Which leads to the realization--hasn't there been a whole lot of seemingly spontaneous and semi-mindless mentioning of Twitter lately? And attention-getting celebritweeting? Hmmm. You don't think that a lot of it might be the result of a paid mentioning campaign? Tough times make people easy to buy. forge a consulting relationship with. I'm not naming names, or even linking (I'd have to talk to the lawyers, and who needs that).
But do any of you know someone who's getting what would amount to Twitterola? ... 2:21 A.M.
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Monday, March 25, 2009
The Starbucks Plan: Jennifer Rubin argues that because the "progressive" business compromise on "card check" proposed by three yuppie-oriented businesses (Starbucks, Whole Foods, Costco) jettisons the two most controversial parts of the labor-backed proposal--the parts circumventing the secret ballot and compulsory arbitration--it shouldn't be considered a pro-labor development:
Even odder is the reaction of some anti-card check lobbying forces which seemed intent on ignoring what the companies are actually proposing. You’d think they’d be throwing a party when Lanny Davis is reduced to hawking a grab bag of half-measures, because not even big Democratic donor CEO’s can bring themselves to support card check. ... [snip]
Most people who can count votes in Congress have figured out that EFCA [card check] is going nowhere — at least for the foreseeable future. So the scramble begins for pro-Big Labor operatives and their allies to find ways of retreating and declaring victory in the face of defeat. But make no mistake: the central planks of EFCA — doing away with the secret ballot and mandatory arbitration – are withering on the legislative vine, no matter what the spinners say.
But the danger for union skeptics-- including but not limited to business!--is that the Starbucks plan will become the starting point for a compromise that then moves in labor's direction, which explains the ferocity of the Chamber of Commerce's dismissal. And some business lobbyists are terrified of a seemingly mild compromise that, while it keeps secret-ballot elections, requires that they be held so quickly that management never gets to make its case. .... 12:02 P.M.
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9% or 53%? Mark Blumenthal heroically reconciles two wildly divergent poll numbers on how many non-union workers would like to unionize. It's highly revealing about how much play there is in polling numbers--and neither poll appears to have been blatantly rigged. ... P.S: But Blumenthal says:
One could also argue that the context of the Hart questions inadvertently framed unions as means to reduce economic insecurity.
"Inadvertently"? In a Hart poll paid for by the AFL-CIO? Blumenthal is being collegial, though he's convincing that any "framing" bias wasn't a huge factor. ... P.P.S.: The defense of Hart's pollster is
But consider also that we've asked the question SEVEN times over a ten year period, and every time the yes vote was over 40%. The prior questions were different every time (but never included any pro-union message questions or anything like that).
Since Hart's poll (unlike Rasmussen's) narrowly focused on the non-managerial workers most likely to face a unionization vote, that 40% figure is less impressive than it might seem. If it applied consistently across the board in unionization elections, it means unions would lose every vote 60-40. ... And Hart included, in that consistent 40%, those who said they would only "probably" vote for a union. ...(Hart also included those who "probably" would vote against. But in a campaign, how likely is it that unions would win over those who are "probably" against, as opposed to losing some of those who are "probably" for? The tendency is for the pro-union vote to get lower as an election nears, no? That's why management likes delaying the vote.) .... 11:35 A.M.
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Sunday, March 22, 2009
Who's more important to the economy than even AIG? Paul Krugman's fundamental critique of the Geithner Toxic Asset plan may or may not be correct,** but this political judgment seems highly questionable:
I'm afraid that this will be the administration's only shot - that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won't have the political capital for a second.***
If the plan fails, and the financial sector remains indisputably frozen up, won't the following happen: Geithner will be fired, a new Treasury secretary will come in with a new plan, maybe a Swedish style nationalization more to Krugman's liking. And then that plan will either work or not work. This doesn't seem like a situation where the "political capital" metaphor applies. The metaphor does apply on an issue like health care--Obama could easily fail to pass his health care plan, lose influence ("capital") and not get another chance. But Congress can't afford to not give Obama another chance to fix the economy. It would be like deciding, in the middle of World War II, that FDR's strategy wasn't working and he'd lost a lot of credibility--so we'll just have to lose the war. ...
On the issue of rescuing the economy, Obama is too big to fail. It follows that, even if Geithner's plan is flawed for the reasons Krugman offers, giving it a try is not as risky.as he fears. ...
Update: The normally reliable Tom Edsall buys the "political capital" argument, unconvincingly. If the problem is populist rage at Obama for doing Wall Street's bidding, how would that prevent a future policy shift to an anti-Wall Street bank nationalization plan? I'm in unaccountable accord with my enemies at Lawyers, Guns and Money on this. ...
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**--See Brad DeLong's defense of the plan and Krugman's counter. I'd say DeLong wins the debate, but that's a different thing than saying he's right.
***---Krugman repeated this argument in his print column:
Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.
11:35 P.M.
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Friday, March 20, 2009
Obama's special envoy Richard Holbrooke served on A.I.G.'s board when the company a) went "over a cliff," and b) approved the now-controversial bonuses. But he'll survive. It's not like he also got special loan deals from Countrywide as a "Friend of Angelo." .... Oh, wait! ... I don't want to know where Holbrooke was when Enron was going down. ... P.S.: Will the White House now have to force three perfectly well-qualified assistant secretaries to withdraw for triviial resume blemishes in order to make up for keeping Holbrooke on? ... [Can we say this is "strike three" if you count each Countrywide loan separately?--ed If you count each Countrywide loan separately it's strike six.] 4:33 A.M.
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
[Updated] Spencer Ackerman, who seems to be a member of the distinguished JournoList group, responds to my item of yesterday:
If Mickey Kaus actually believes what he writes here, he'll publish every journalism-related email, letter, fax or notebook scribble he's ever shared with another reporter to trade ideas. If he doesn't do that, this pathetic has-been should shut the fuck up and find a way to get over his unbecoming obsession with Ezra Klein. [E.A.]
I'm beginning to worry that they're really not going to invite me. ... P.S.: C.A.P.'s Matthew Yglesias agrees with Ackerman. It seems like a silly argument. Aren't there lots of activities that are highly desirable when practiced by individuals on a small or dispersed, uncoordinated basis, but become problematic when practiced on a large scale by competing groups? It's nice to eat dinner with a friend at Princeton. But when large, exclusive eating clubs form and come to provide the "only decent, attractive, and convivial accomodations available to a Princeton undergraduate," there's a problem. Similarly, private backyards are a good thing. But if the private backyards and common areas of rich people in gated communities come to use up the bulk of attractive potentially public parkland, there's a legitimate social issue.
Everybody has private notes, sources, or conversations. That doesn't mean a secret conversation among "hundreds" of influential Democratic writers doesn't potentially create problems. Groupthink might be one of them. ... Hey, and another might be the fostering of an us-vs-them mentality! Maybe even a weakness for smug rationalization. ... Another might be that writers on JournoList begin to devote their energies more inward--toward convincing or impressing or at least not angering their fellow club members--than outward, toward convincing their fellow citizens. ... Or if it simply becomes true that all the best arguments are made on private list-servs. Yglesias and Ackerman certainly aren't making them in public.
Update: Reihan Salam says don't worry about JournoList enforcing "message discipline":
After talking to a number of friends, and after observing its workings from a distance, I've concluded that the JList has virtually no disciplining functon. It is a forum for robust debate, not a tool for forming a tightly-knit Leninist cadre.
He's probably mostly right, but remember: 1) It's the robustness of what comes out of JournoList we're talking about, not what goes on inside. 2) There sure was a whole lot of discipline on the left in the Edwards adultery scandal, at least until Lee Stranahan came along (and he was then banned from Daily Kos). I doubt you needed JournoList to get left activists defensive about Elizabeth Edwards, or to get Daily Kos to be thuggish, but it may have helped. The only way to know is to know what went on inside. 3) Reader A.A. adds an excellent point:
I thought that one of the netroots' complaints against the old MSM was rightly that elitist journalists in DC tended to self-police their content because they did not want to breach taboos within their social networks; this previous system, the argument goes, favored the status quo and turned a lot of national-level journalism into the recitation of talking points. One of the great things about the internet in this context was that it allowed for a wider spectrum of opinion to be discussed -- a change that helped to make it possible for national politics to shift to the left.
Wasn't it a few years ago that many of these left blogosphere types were ridiculing the Beltway Kool Kids who did things like criticize unions and defend Clintonism? I think it was! Now they've created their own Kool Kids club.... Is Ezra Klein the new William F. Buckley or the new Tim Russert, helping establish the boundaries of what's respectably thinkable? 4) Regarding that last link, my comrade Glenn Greenwald thinks he's already spotted some backscratching that's been hidden from view:
Touching: on Journalist, Ezra attacked critics of Douthat. Now Ross says Ezra is the William Buckley of our era: http://tinyurl.com/d62o2b
Hasn't Greenwald broken the seal of omerta? If he's in the JList club, doesn't he now get cast out into the darkness? Is there a ceremony? Win-win! ...
More: Salam, on his way to exculpating the JList, makes the following mousetrappish point, which might cause trouble for some in the dwindling minority of "objective" non-opinion journalists:
As a minor-league policy wonk, I find the idea of taking part in off-the-record conversations with eminent historians, economists, and reporters very attractive -- yet I was told early on that I wasn't eligible, for the excellent and obvious reason that my sympathies aren't generally on the left. Though I could agree to the off-the-recordness of the JList, I'd inevitably discuss its contents with conservative friends and collaborators, like The Atlantic's own Ross Douthat.
This raises the question -- why is it that a number of journalists at so-called "mainstream" outlets, like Time, do pass muster.
And: Joel Achenbach doesn't think the Web needs more ideas hashed out in public:
Blogworld doesn't need more raw copy, more e-mails masquerading as opinion columns. Blogworld is crammed to the rafters with blather. Secretly -- don't tell anyone -- I read a lot of blogs at work, and in general wish they were better, more thoughtful, with less of the "No, YOU'RE the giant arsehole" stuff.
But if there's blather on the web, maybe that's because all the best discussions are taking place in secret on JournoList! No, I don't think so either. 1:49 A.M.
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Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Brad DeLong objects to the hed--"Inside the echo chamber"--on Michael Calderone's piece discussing the underknown leftish email cabal organized by Ezra Klein:
It's not an echo chamber. I have never seen a less echo chamber-like space in my life. The headline is simply wrong.
Fair enough. But I think the headline-writers' worry was that an "echo chamber" is what the outside world tends to get from members of JournoList once they've vigorously hashed out their disagreements in secret. "Inside the Echo Factory" would be a headline more accurately reflecting that concern. It's noisy in a factory but the product is often standardized.
Is the fear of groupthink justified? I can think of one example that could be checked out (though it's hard to do that without knowing who is in the secretive group and who isn't) -- namely, the the treatment of the New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist" controversy. I'm told that at least one TNR editor defended the magazine to others on the list--'don't worry, it will turn out OK, only a couple of mistakes,' etc. Did this have the effect of preventing some members of the list from criticizing the magazine until much later--whenTNR editors themselves finally gave up and cut the "Diarist" loose? I wouldn't be surprised if it did. The same might well go for John Edwards and his cheating scandal. A back-channel, under-radar group--especially one in which you can argue off the record--is good for keeping troops in line.
There's a second, less uncertain, concern (aside from my primary beef, which is that they didn't invite me). Blogger Doxophilic writes:
You are supposed to brainstorm, deliberate, revise and improve. This goes for anyone who writes with the purpose of persuasion or education, including journalists.
That's true. But I always thought one of the big ideas of the Web was that, to the maximum extent possible, these deliberations and revisions and improvements could now take place in public, where everyone could follow along and maybe contribute. Doxophiliac argues that people should be able to "backtrack if someone makes a good argument in response"--but you can "backtrack" in public too. It's been done. Even by Joe Klein!
We non-elite writers learn something just from watching the sausage get made. One thing we learn is it's just sausage. Ezra Klein has taken a lot of what could be highly informative back and forth on the World Wide Web and privatized it, much as rich people in gated communities reclaim green space from the public sphere and wall it off behind guards and fences. It's not an egalitarian or democratic impulse.
P.S.: Here's DeLong's preferred description of JournoList:
[I]t is the people whom Ezra thinks are smart enough, committed enough to discussion and learning and education, and good-hearted enough to be worth emailing regularly--and the rest of us free-ride on the virtual space that is Ezra's network. [E.A.]
False modesty? Check. Suck up to the organizer? Check. Underlying, self-satisfied exclusionary impulse? Check. ... 6:39 P.M.
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We know what kausfiles readers want: More card check items, and multipart card check items.
1.) In a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview, Sen. Specter appears unfazed by labor's big single issue offer of support if only he'll vote for card check:
"Labor continues to press its case on the basis of a lot of jobs being exported, the pensions have gone to hell, lots of problems. And, as I say in my floor statement and law review article, I am well aware of the tradition of secret ballot on political elections and the difficulties of binding arbitration on the conducting of a business so I'm hearing people on all sides," he said.
Jennifer Rubin and Greg Sargent interpret this as an anti-card-check quote--and Specter does hint he'd rather focus on reforming the National Labor Relations Board than screw around with the secret ballot or impose mandatory arbitration (both things the card check bill would do). But as Rubin notes, after the unions' Big Offer Specter had to push off from labor's position, even if he intends to vote for the bill. Otherwise he'd look like a stooge.
2. The labor side's ability to get reporters to use their version of card-check's controversial secret ballot provisions continues to amaze. Here's WaPo's Alec MacGillis:
The bill, first introduced in 2003, gives workers the choice of whether they want to organize by getting a majority of workers to sign pro-union cards, instead of having to hold secret-ballot elections.
That's one finely-spun sentence there. Who are the "workers" who will have this "choice"? They are the union organizers mounting a unionization campaign. Do any other "workers" who sign or don't sign the cards have a "choice" of methods? a) The cards aren't to choose the method. They are to choose the union. If 50% of the workers sign the cards the union will have won, period. An election at that point is prohibited; b) The only way an individual worker could use this system to "choose" a secret ballot election is by somehow signing a card if it will help union organizers meet the 30% threshhold required for an election but refusing to sign it if it will give the union organizers the 50% that will kill the election. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer recently outlined this complicated card-signing strategy with a straight face on the House floor. But of course no individual worker will know if his signed card will provide the 31% plurality or the 51% majority. Only the organizers know this. You could sign the card intending to provoke an election and discover that you actually prevented an election. There's no way for ordinary workers to reliably game the system in order to "choose" a secret ballot. c) The whole underlying dispute is over whether the act of signing cards is an accurate expression of worker choices, or whether it subjects individuals to subtle and unsubtle community pressure to vote against their real preference. By assuming that the cards represent the true "choice" of workers, Hoyer and others assume what is at issue.
Greg Sargent, also of WaPo, offers a slightly different, but also deceptive version of the labor "choice" spin, which Jennifer Rubin critiques.
What is it with WaPo? Has a mid-level editor handed down an edict that the 'workers' choice' description has to be followed? Its persistence is especially odd since there would appear to be a short, clear and honest way of describing the bill, which is that it "eliminates an employer's ability to insist on a secret ballot election before recognizing a union." We card check opponents don't like this description because it emphasizes management's rights, not workers' privacy rights. Card check supporters don't like the description because it is accurate.
The whole point of the change is to give unions a way to avoid a secret ballot when the employer thinks the union might lose such an election.
3) Rasmussen reports that only 9% of non-union workers would like to belong to a union. Labor backers often cite a 2005 Peter Hart survey showing that 53% of "non-managerial workers ... definitely or probably would vote in favor of union representation in their workplace." Hard to reconcile those two numbers, no? The Hart poll was paid for by the AFL-CIO, but that doesn't make it wrong. It would be useful to see the exact Hart questions (and the questions on the same poll that preceded them). ... 3:05 A.M.
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Monday, March 16, 2009
Saenz Zinnied: Hmm. If an NYT editorial did in Tom Daschle as Health and Human Services secretary, did an Investor's Business Daily editorial do in Thomas Saenz, the former Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attorney who was reportedly in line to become head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights division? Saenz seems to have been Zinnied--unselected at the last minute--and, according to his friend, L.A. supervisor Gloria Molina
"It was a political decision from the White House, because of Tom's work on immigration rights" ....
Saenz helped hammer out the creepy liberal lawyers' conspiracy deal that wiped Prop. 187, which for good or ill was passed by California voters, off the books. (Prop. 187 would have barred illegals from receiving many government services.). I'm certainly glad that White House didn't pick Saenz as place to draw the line and not let appearances govern whom it gets to appoint. One wonders, as usual with this White House, whether appearances are all it is sensitive to. Mark Krikorian reports that Saenz's replacement, Maryland labor secretary Tom Perez, is a former president of the board of that state's "premier pro-illegal-immigration advocacy group." ... P.S.: If strident advocacy on behalf of illegals got Saenz Zinnied, what got Zinni Zinnied? In retrospect, maybe Zinni should ask Chas Freeman! Just a thought. ... 7:44 P.M.
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Suppose Larry Summers suddenly became Lindsay Lohan. Or (more accurately) Lindsay Lohan suddenly became Ezra Klein: You're a young showbiz celeb who, unlike Paris Hilton, can actually act. Since you're worth something in respectable box office terms, and you've done the occasional Disney film, getting publicity via, say, an illicit sex tape is both unnecessary and counterproductive. But you can be the victim of an illicit twitter leak! Not a crudely straightforward public post, like Demi Moore, but something that at least has the appearance of, and maybe actually is, an authentic privacy violation. ... P.S.: Not saying that's what happened here. Just saying! I guess this is obvious ... 4:27 P.M.
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Obama's Presidency in Retrospect--The Daschle Cave: TNR editorializes that Obama's "high minded ethics standards" are preventing him from filling key appointive positions. a) Is Obama's problem an "ethics" obsession or a press obsession? Bouncing Nancy Killefer because a lien had once been put on her house due to $298 in unpaid unemployment taxes on household help--a debt she'd taken care of years ago--didn't reflect an ethics obsession. It reflected a hypertrophied fear of a little ding in the press that might cost the Obama administration .0001% in the polls. At some point, Obama needs to stand up for a qualified appointment (other than Tim Geithner), say "this is my nominee," take the minor news-cycle hit, and push it through. b) In hindsight, isn't it clear that the moment to do this was Daschle's nomination to head Health and Human Services? Daschle was supposed to be the key to the administration's health care strategy. His tax problem involved an understandable question of interpretation (when does a "perk" become taxable income?). Instead, Obama let Daschle get spooked by a self-righteous editorial in the New York Times. Why not tell the Times to stuff it? This isn't an excess of Obama administration ethics. It's a deficiency of Obama administration cojones. ... 1:06 A.M.
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Get-Up-and-Get-a-Beer Line of the Day: From Noam Scheiber's solid, highly favorable profile of Larry Summers--
There is surely real value to Summers's respect for institutional boundaries. And no one thinks Larry Summers has suddenly become Sally Quinn. Colleagues say he remains fiercely opinionated in meetings; his humor is sometimes cutting. [E.A.]
Projected reader response: 'Hmm. Interesting. If Larry Summers suddenly became Sally Quinn, what would that be like? Lots of possibilities. Would he marry Ben Bradlee? Wonder what Scheiber means. I'll get up and get a beer and think about it.'... P.S.: Does Sally Quinn respect institutional boundaries? Didn't she, a non-Catholic, recently roil Catholics by taking communion at Tim Russert's funeral and then doubling down when criticized about it? Is Quinn secretly meek and unopinionated to those who know her well? Help! ...
Update: Matt Yglesias calls Scheiber's piece "[t]he mother of all beat-sweeteners." Maybe Yglesias really does put his most interesting stuff on Twitter. ... I like Summers so I was receptive to Scheiber's sympathetic take. You have to wonder, though, if Scheiber--or Summers--is setting Treasury secretary Geithner up for a fall with this passage:
Thanks to his vast intellectual range and the urgency of the moment, Summers has thus far taken a leading role in the housing plan, the auto industry rescue, health care, and energy, in addition to the stimulus. But, when it comes to the bank bailout, the consensus is that Summers has scrupulously respected Geithner's turf.
The most-criticized part of Obama's economic strategy is the one part he's not responsible for. ... More: In public, Summers has praised Geithner for daring not to have a plan!
You know I think Secretary Geithner has handled this in a difficult and courageous way. The easy thing to do would be--and anybody who has worked in Washington for a while knows how to do it--would be to lay out a nine point plan with the illusion of specificity and the sense of certainty about what the future would bring.
This defense seems less friendly than it did yesterday. ...1:24 A.M.
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Are Toyota resale values falling? Automotive News reports that the legendary resale value of Toyotas coming off lease has fallen to 46.5%, which is below projections. ... It's not clear if this reflects some underlying problem with the vehicles. (That would be a big deal in the car world.). ... The Toyota Tundra truck, for example, was expected to retain about 60% of its value. In fact it kept only 40.1%. Yet that's still better than its Detroit competitors, the Chevy Silverado (39.9%) and Ford F-150 (32.2%). ... 1:51 A.M.
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Friday, March 13, 2009
Pssst, C.A.P.! Your star blogger, Matt Yglesias, is giving his best stuff to Twitter! Maybe it's just a way to avoid the Palmieri police ... P.S.: It's still not as good as Ezra Klein's best stuff. ... 6:34 P.M.
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Single-issue labor: The AFL-CIO attempts to make Senator Specter an offer he can't refuse: Vote for "card check" and we will support you in 2010. Is this a sign of desperation? Not necessarily--what could a future Democratic senator from PA give labor that would be more important than "card check"? ... But what about all those other GOP senators labor was supposedly lining up? ... P.S.: Kos suggests this makes it much more likely that Specter will switch parties and run as a Democrat (in the process giving Dems their 60 vote Senate majority). Doesn't a Liebermanesque run as an independent seem more in keeping with Specter's self-image? ...7:32 P.M.
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Does free trader Jagdish Bhagwati really think increased unionization will solve the problem of "stagnation of workers' wages," or does he just like the way the "union decline" explanation takes the heat off the competing explanation that would blame free trade? It's hard to read his recent TNR piece without tending toward the latter conclusion. ...
P.S.: It's entirely possible, of course, that wage stagnation would take place even without trade--thanks to "domestic" factors Bhagwati cites (like "labor-saving technical changes" that reduce the market for unskilled work)--without the decline of unions being a major cause. And Bhagwati doesn't say it is a major cause, only that Andy Stern, the SEIU, and "many labor economists" think it is. .. Note also that Bhagwati, like so many "card check" defenders, doesn't actually approve of the "card check" part of the card check bill:
And it is, indeed,hard to defend the denial of an automatic secret ballot.
Does Bhagwati, as an ardent market-oriented free trader, find it easier to defend the mandatory government arbitration provisions of the "card check bill? If not, what's left? ... [via Yglesias]
P.P.S.: And if Lawrence Summers' tepid and abstract remarks on unions at the Brookings Institution this week were, as Sam Stein claims, "stronger than anything that has come from the White House since [the card check bill] was introduced," that's mainly a reflection of how watery the White House's support has been, something Stein (unlike Marc Ambinder) recognizes. ... Summers doesn't so much as mention fostering greater unionization in the text of his speech--not even in the parts about ensuring that growth is widely shared. He answers a press question on the subject by endorsing "some adjustment in an environment that has proven so problematic for labor union organizing." But he doesn't endorse the specific "adjustment" in the card check bill, and indeed warns that "we need to be mindful as we redress a pendulum that has swung of the risks of swinging pendulums too far." ... 2:39 A.M.
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Marc Ambinder now says he was wrong to underestimate the prospects of "card check":
A major development during my short medical leave was the introduction in the House and Senate of the Employee Free Choice Act, or "card check" for union organizing. So rapidly has this issue matured, in fact, that I have cause to re-examine whether my approach to the politics of card check underweights some fundamental realities.
A week ago, virtually all of the political cognoscienti believed as an article of faith that the White House did not want Congress to introduce EFCA this year... that Obama was wavering on the legislation itself... that congressional backers were too afraid of the vote count to go ahead.
We were wrong; Obama, Vice President Biden and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis made public statements in favor of card check and the bill was introduced in both houses.
What did we miss?
I don't remember Ambinder underweighting card check's chances! But never mind. Is he on to something? Or is he living in an altermative universe (or being spun by someone)? He's a serious reporter with better sources than I have. He could be right! And if Citigroup keeps throwing its sterling reputation into the anti-card-check fight, anything is possible. (Next: Bernie Madoff comes out against EFCA?) I am not invested in the idea that card check won't pass. I'm invested in the idea that card check is terrible.
But here's the evidence for the alternative universe theory:
a) Did anyone really expect Democrats not to even introduce the card check bill this year? I hadn't heard that. Practically everything gets introduced, no?
b) Obama and Biden made public statements in favor of card check, but why wouldn't they? Why not give at least lip service? That would be true--maybe especially true--if the White House didn't think card check was going to pass. In the event, both statements were fairly brief and non-full-throated. Obama:
"As we confront this crisis and work to provide health care to every American, rebuild our nation's infrastructure, move toward a clean energy economy, and pass the Employee Free Choice Act, I want you to know that you will always have a seat at the table."
[Note that this is not "Obama Vows to Pass Card Check" or "We Will Pass the Employee Free Choice Act," This is "we will work to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.'.]
Biden:
So, folks, that's why there's no one thing we have to do. This is all going to be difficult, and one of the most difficult things will be to reinstitute that basic bargain. And I think the way to do that is the Employee Free Choice Act. (Applause.)
Note that Biden also avoids vowing that the bill will pass. ... I guess there was some hope on the anti-card-check side that Obama would duck the issue entirely. But he was a lot more forceful on the subject in the campaign.
c) Even if Obama actually desperately wants the bill to pass, he might not want to put his full prestige on the line right now. Fair enough. The key to the bill isn't Obama. It's the Senate, where it takes 60 votes to beat a filibuster. Here Ambinder says:
So -- does labor have the votes in the Senate? I think they're close, as Sen. Ben Nelson understands the wiggle room he has by potentially supporting cloture while opposing the final bill.
But the list of Senators he cites has 15 undecided Democrats on it. Keep in mind that in order to get 60 votes, the card check side will probably have to hold all fifteen. And the list leaves off Sen. McCaskill--who recently said "I'm not sure we have the votes" and certainly sounded like she was desperately seeking a face-saving compromise. Even South Dakota's Tim Johnson is now publicly wavering. Make that 17 undecided Democrats.
d) How can Dems get almost all of those 17? Ambinder is counting on the hoary Senate kabuki of "supporting cloture while opposing the final bill." In other words, wavering Senators like Ben Nelson would help the bill pass by voting to end the filibuster, but then join the minority on the final vote (when the bill would only need the support of 50 senators) and tell constituents that he was really against it on the merits.**
This may work on obscure bills. But does it work on big, well-publicized fights? I'm not so sure. During the big Senate immigration fight of 2007 it was obvious to everyone, even the electorate, that the cloture vote was the key vote and voting for cloture was in effect supporting the bill. (That's one reason cloture didn't even get a majority.) And if the main opposition to card check comes from the business community--well, does Ambinder think the Chamber of Commerce is going to be fooled by the old Cloture Two-Step? Does he think senators think the Chamber of Commerce will be fooled?
e) Ambinder's final paragraph is not exactly the ringing note of confidence his alleged reassessment would lead you to expect:
I now believe that 2009 can be a dress rehearsal for 2010 and beyond -- since the Democratic Party will have incumbents to pressure in the midterms and probably have a larger Senate majority in 2011 regardless.
Dress rehearsal for 2011! I'll take that. Is that labor's new optimistic pro-card-check line? Maybe they are suddenly trying to lull their foes to sleep.
**--Only 10 senators could pull this stunt, of course, or else the bill would fail to get a majority (unless some of its opponents abstain). 3:11 A.M.
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I'm not ready to jump on Jim Hoffa of the Teamsters for this paragraph in his pro-card-check press release:
"Since when is the secret ballot a basic tenet of democracy?" Hoffa said. "Town meetings in New England are as democratic as they come, and they don't use the secret ballot. Elections in the Soviet Union were by secret ballot, but those weren't democratic."
That raises some interesting and not-irrelevant issues. But Hoffa's euphemism for the mandatory arbitration-of-first-contract provision in the bill needs a bit of work:
The bill would also strengthen penalties for violations against workers who are trying to organize or negotiate a first contract, and ensure all parties negotiate a first contract in good faith. [E.A.]
I'm going to make him an offer he can't ...I mean, I'm going to ensure he negotiates in good faith! ...P.S.: Once a workplace is unionized, can't the mighty Teamsters get what they want the old-fashioned way--by threatening a strike? Now the poor little union needs the feds to come in and do the job for them? .... 3:11 A.M.
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Thursday, March 12, 2009
You Know This Guy We Haven't Told You About? Well, He's Not Going to Be Important! During the Trent Lott scandal, if I remember right, there was speculation that the blogosphere would really have arrived when a high public official suddenly resigned over an Web-borne scandal without the scandal being mentioned in the respectable mainstream press--so if you had only read the New York Times or Washington Post you'd have no idea why this person quit or what the scandal was until he or she was gone. Poof! Killed by ninja blogs.** Well (without regard to the merits of the dispute), the Charles Freeman withdrawal is close to that case, no? WaPo apparently printed its first news story on the controversy the day it ended--i.e. when Freeman withdrew. Ditto the New York Times. ... What does this event signify? Not to be too portentous, but it signifies you can no longer be a well-informed citizen if you just read the Times and Post print editions. You have to go online. Sorry, Mom! ... [via Corner and Maguire]
**--The Lott affair was largely blog-driven, but it wasn't a blog-only or non-MSM scandal. It was launched by ABC's The Note, and received a crucial assist from Thomas Edsall in WaPo. ..
P.S.: On the merits, Charles Lane took up Freeman's challenge to read his speeches in their entirety:
Freeman’s strong suit is supposed to be original, contrarian thinking on foreign affairs. Actually, it’s more like a competing brand of conventional wisdom.
1:25 A.M.
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Center for American Progress' Jennifer Palmieri says the daily "8:45 A.M." call among leftish activists (disclosed by Politico) is an attempt to give the White House a "coordinated echo chamber on the outside." [E.A.] She is subtle, isn't she? ... It wasn't enough for Palmieri to emasculate poor Matt Yglesias. Now she has to belittle the entire left wing of the Democratic Party. ... Jane Hamsher resists. ...
Update: Jonah Goldberg argues that CAP is a cargo cult. ... 2:34 A.M.
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Eduwonk's Andy Rotherham reads Obama's education speech to find the battle lines between the President and the teachers' unions. ... He links to others who do the same thing. ... And he writes good heds. ... P.S.: Obama did have a strong-but-vague graf on dismissing bad teachers:
And just as we've given our teachers all the support they need to be successful, we need to make sure our students have the teacher they need to be successful. And that means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom. But let me be clear -- (applause.) Let me be clear -- the overwhelming number of teachers are doing an outstanding job under difficult circumstances. My sister is a teacher, so I know how tough teaching can be. But let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances but still does not improve, there's no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences. The stakes are too high. [E.A.]
Will Jennifer Palmieri let them talk about this on the 8:45 A.M. call? Seems risky--might detract from the requisite unanimity. Or else they all might decide to go after Obama. ... 2:46 A.M.
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It's pretty clear which direction the "card check" fight is going: With Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson saying "I'm not in favor of the bill as it [is now]," and the circle of queasy Dems growing larger by the day, even pro-labor Sen. Tom Harkin suggests the bill will be revised before being brought to a vote. So when labor boasts of getting 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, they are boasting about votes for a bill that has yet to be written--or a rewrite that has yet to be made public (though Hot Air has heard rumors). The question, of course, is whether the bill will retain the controversial elements (allowing unions to bypass secret ballot elections, imposing arbitration on the first contract) and whether, if it doesn't retain them, it will still make changes in rules and procedures, etc. that will substantially help labor organize more workers. More on this later.
As a "card check" opponent, though, I worry that labor has a secret weapon that I'd previously failed to appreciate. Call it "juice." A "juice bill," in California parlance, is a bill that is so important to monied interests that lawmakers are showered with contributions from interested parties and lobbyists all find work representing one side or the other."Card Check" is the Odwalla of juice bills. It's a proposal that terrifies virtually all of American business, which has responded--as Politico's Ben Smith first chronicled--by a massive program to employ out-of-work Republican lobbyists.
The problem with "juice bills" is that so many people have a vested interest in keeping the fight going. Politicians, most obviously. The longer they're undecided, the longer corporate and union interests will try to subtly influence them with large campaign contributions. End the fight and the money stops. But lobbyists--even, maybe especially, business' lobbyists--also have a vested interest in keeping at least the threat of card check alive. The last thing you want to do, if you're a business lobbyist trying to put your kids through college, is win the card check fight quickly. What would be the point of that? You'd be out of a job. No, you want to not lose the card check fight while keeping alive the possibility of legislation that will continue to terrify your corporate clients into hiring you.
The same, I'm afraid, goes for the press--at least the specialized press that covers labor. When was the last time Steven Greenhouse actually had a labor story that attracted mass interest? Why would he want the fun to end?
It's in none of these groups self-interest to kill card check anytime soon. This is an alarming realization for those, like me, who want to kill card check soon. It's not the main reason the card check fight will go on--the main reason is that the majority Democrats really want to pass something making it easier for workers to form unions. But it might be a factor in prolonging the bill's life beyond its ordinary span. If Democratic support for the original "card check" bill fades, a new compromise will be floated. If support for that fades, there will be another compromise, etc.. If labor seems willing to settle for something less-than-terrifying to business, it's in the interest of the pols, the press, and even (perhaps especially) business' own lobbyists to see that labor sticks to its guns and presses for something more radical.
It will never end, at least if the permanent Beltway culture has its way--not until every incumbent Senator's campaign is fully funded and every ex-Administrative Assistant's mortgage is paid and every labor journalist wins a Nieman Fellowship. La loot continua. 1:51 A.M.
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Monday, March 9, 2009
When I read the headline "Limbaugh: Kennedy Will Be Dead By the Time Health Care Bill Passes," I just sort of assumed that Limbaugh had said something like "Kennedy will be dead by the time the health care bill passes." Those talk radio hosts always have to generate controversy. etc. Here's what he actually said:
We have a banking and a credit crisis. Obama and his team had a show gathering to focus on the problem, but they have done little, if anything, to so much as start fixing it. Any leader would keep focused on fixing that mess, but that's not the stuff that makes approval numbers rise, because there really isn't much he can do except shift people's attitudes about it.
So he's moved on to health care. This is highly visible, it's news leading, gets a great focus, plus it has the great liberal lion Teddy Kennedy pushing it. Before it's all over it will be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill. So when you have the banking and the credit problem still unfixed and with health care still unfixed, they'll move on to another caring story: alternate energy -- I don't know; your guess is as good as mine.
Not quite the same thing, is it? Limbaugh's not saying, "Nyah, nyah, the bill will take so long to pass that Kennedy will be dead." I'm not sure he's even saying Kennedy will die--couldn't you have a "memorial" to him while he's alive? He's mainly arguing that Obama will try to boost his approval by playing to emotions and "caring," and that he and his allies will use sympathy for the illness of the "great liberal lion" to generate support for a health care bill (as they undoubtedly will). ... I don't agree with Limbaugh's argument--I think Obama wants to actually pass health care, not just distract attention from his failure to solve the banking crisis. But the statement isn't really disrespectful of Kennedy. If anything, it's the other way around.
Shame on me for believing a HuffPo headline.
P.S.: The whole Begala-Carville coordinated campaign against Limbaugh seems misguided when Obama is supposed to be leading the nation out of crisis (see Warren Buffett's comments, below). Quite apart from whether it's a good idea to take one of your smarter opponents and build him up, the campaign seems petty, partisan and poll-driven--not designed to produce any kind of national pulling-together. If Begala weren't around I'd suspect Chris Lehane of thinking it up. ... 8:11 P.M.
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First Time The MSM Has Ever Ignored Warren Buffett: The press accounts I've read have wildly underplayed Obama supporter Warren Buffet's criticism of the President on CNBC today. It's fairly pointed, and Buffett comes back to it, suggesting he has a message he's trying to deliver. [E.A.]:
BUFFETT: ...And, Joe, it--if you're in a war, and we really are on an economic war, there's a obligation to the majority to behave in ways that don't go around inflaming the minority. If on December 8th when--maybe it's December 7th, when Roosevelt convened Congress to have a vote on the war, he didn't say, `I'm throwing in about 10 of my pet projects ... [snip] ...
JOE: Yeah, but you might--might not have fixed...
BUFFETT: But I say...
JOE: You might not--you might not have fixed global warming the day after--the day after D-Day, Warren.
BUFFETT: Absolutely. And I think that the--I think that the Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and to realize you need one leader and, in general, support of that. But I think that the--I think that the Democrats--and I voted for Obama and I strongly support him, and I think he's the right guy--but I think they should not use this--when they're calling for unity on a question this important, they should not use it to roll the Republicans all.
JOE: Hm.
BUFFETT: I think--I think a lot of things should be--job one is to win the war, job--the economic war, job two is to win the economic war, and job three. And you can't expect people to unite behind you if you're trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat. So I would--I would absolutely say for the--for the interim, till we get this one solved, I would not be pushing a lot of things that are--you know are contentious, and I also--I also would do no finger-pointing whatsoever. I would--you know, I would not say, you know, `George'--`the previous administration got us into this.' Forget it. I mean, you know, the Navy made a mistake at Pearl Harbor and had too many ships there. But the idea that we'd spend our time after that, you know, pointing fingers at the Navy, we needed the Navy. So I would--I would--I would--no finger-pointing, no vengeance, none of that stuff. Just look forward. ..[snip] ...
BUFFETT: Well, I was going to mention to Joe that you've heard this comment recently from some Democrats recently that a `crisis is a terrible thing to waste.'
BECKY: Yeah.
BUFFETT: Now, just rephrase that and since it's, in my view, it's an economic war, and--I don't think anybody on December 7th would have said a `war is a terrible thing to waste, and therefore we're going to try and ram through a whole bunch of things and--but we expect to--expect the other party to unite behind us on the--on the big problem.' It's just a mistake, I think, when you've got one overriding objective, to try and muddle it up with a bunch of other things.
P.S.: He's against "card check." ("I think the secret ballot's pretty important in the country.") ... 7:19 P.M.
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Least convincing editorial ever?** WaPo's ed board admits 1) earmarks aren't the problem 2) the "omnibus" spending bill now before Congress would mean a "significant jump in domestic spending" of either 6 or 8 percent 3) this increase will be "built into the annual baseline" and as a practical matter, set the floor for future spending; 4) if you add in the already-passed stimulus, the "overall increase in domestic spending is a staggering 80 percent;" 5) Obama's 2010 budget "appears to envision another increase in excess of 6 percent in this category."
Yet the Post endorses the omnibus bill. It argues the only alterntive is the GOP's spending freeze. Huh? Why not block the bill, cut the increase in across-the-board spending on existing agencies in half, and substitute equivalent spending on stimulus programs that actually are reversible once the economy recovers? A Third Way! It's the sort of thing a presidential veto might accomplish, if there were a president around. ... [via Corner]
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** Harmless bloggy hyperbole. But it's a pretty strange editorial. ... 6:19 P.M.
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Creeping Multiple Interstitialism as a Negative Indicator of Web Site Health: Often, when you click on an appealing headline at the home page of a Web aggregation side, you're taken, not to the original source, but to another page on the aggregator site that summarizes the story. This second page, known (at least around here) as an "interstitial," allows the aggregator web site to get another "page view" and maybe satisfy readers before they leave the site, perhaps never to return. (Here's one example of such a page.) Interstitials can be seen as a consumer convenience or a cheap, parasitic, hit-inflating trick. But over at TIME, Mark Halperin's The Page appears to have take the technique a step further. Last week, when I hit on Halperin's home page reference to Politico's hot story of an "Ominbus Confrontation" between Pelosi and Reid, I got sent, not to the Politico story but to this page on Halperin's site. OK--but from there I could get to the Politico story, right? Nope. From there I could click to a yet another page on Halperin's site that gleaned the juicy bits from Politico's report. A double interstitial. Innovative! Only from this third Page page could you get to the original Politico story Halperin was cribbing from ... Is Time that desperate? ... 1:46 A.M.
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An American car worth buying? USA Today's James Healey raves about the Ford Focus SES. Some patriotic recessionary boosterism is probably at work--I don't believe the Focus has "upscale ambience inside." I've looked inside. But still. ... Fits with my non-expert theory that the old, obsolete Focus chassis in the current U.S. model is actually better balanced than the much-hailed modern chassis underneath the European version of the Focus and the tragic Mazda 3. ... P.S.: The U.S. car looks cheesy but reliability has been good, according to Consumer Reports. ... Made in Wayne, Michigan. ... 1:24 A.M.
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"McCaskill Offers Dire Take on Employee Free Choice Act"--headline on Huffington Post. "I'm not sure if we have the votes," is what centrist Dem. Sen. McCaskill says. What she mean "we"? ... P.S.: It actually reads to me as if McCaskill successfully ducked taking a stand on the "card check" bill itself. But you make the call. ... P.P.S.: If the Dems don't have the votes for "card check" in the bag, I don't quite understand the strategy behind labor's blustery show of confidence. ("We are not worried at all.") Sure, the unions would like to have a strong hand in any backroom negotiations over a compromise. And they don't want wavering Dems like McCaskill to think they have permission to be the Senator who puts 60 votes out of reach. But won't labor look like a paper tiger if the votes aren't there? ... P.P.P.S.: Then again, labor thought it had the votes of enough workers at Nissan's Tennessee plant too, before losing by a 2-1 margin. Damn secret ballot. ...
Update: Still no announcement from HuffPo inviting union organizers to start collecting cards from the website's Brentwood and Soho employees. Expected soon, because Employee Free Choice is On the Move! ...11:24 P.M.
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Those worried about whether the Dem stimulus plus Obama's budget will produce an irreversible, costly, increase in the size of government--potentially crowding out future expensive Democratic initiatives such as universal health insurance--won't be cheered by this Washington Post story. Estimates of the additional federal workers soon to be hired range from 100,000 (from Prof. Paul Light) to 260,000 (from the Heritage Foundation). For example:
Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs ... said they expect to hire more than 17,000 new employees by the end of the year, many at hospitals and other facilities to fulfill Obama's pledge to expand veterans' access to health care. The agency -- whose budget will grow by 11 percent, to $56 billion, under Obama's plan -- will add about 7,900 nurses, 3,300 doctors, 3,800 clerks and 2,400 practical nurses, spokeswoman Josephine Schuda said.
That's just one agency. ... And what if in the future we decide to shrink the veterans' health system in order to save money and beef up the system for the rest of the population? Good luck. My impression is that the average citizen has no idea how difficult it is to get rid of federal workers once they have been hired. Here are the relevant rules for federal "reductions in force," or RIFs, complete with elaborate rights of employees with seniority to "bump" lower level employees, causing a chaotic cascade of job switches. Ronald Reagan came into office with a huge head of steam to cut the bureaucracy. He succeeded in RIFing the equivalent of fewer than 80,000 full-time non-defense workers--105,000 counting all part-timers--a reduction that didn't last long. (Here's a Heritage report on the subject.)
Couldn't a future administration, faced with budget deficits, just freeze hiring and let attrition reduce the work force? Sure, if you want the best people to leave and the worst (i.e., the least likely to get private sector jobs) to stay. What about contracting out? Contractors can always be terminated, after all, without the complications of civil service rules. And contracting out was certainly the option favored by recent administrations, including Clinton's. Alas, the Post notes
Obama's insistence that he would scale back the use of private-sector contractors.
AFSCME will be happy. No wonder Washington, D.C. real estate is already starting to come back.** ...
P.S.: This generalized federal bloat, and not "earmarks," looms as the real disaster of Obama's first budgets. If an Alaska senator sticks in an earmark for the Bridge to Nowhere, at least the taxpayers are likely to get a Bridge to Nowhere. If we increase the Department of Transportation budget and they hire a new Human Resources coordinator, what does that get us? ...
P.P.S.: Here's a not-atypical argument for hiring new civil servants:
Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers in 31 federal agencies, said the administration appears to be "rebuilding workforces that have not been properly maintained and supported."
At the Internal Revenue Service, she said, "there are hundreds of thousands more taxpayers today than there were 10 years ago, and there are 27,000 fewer employees." [E.A.]
Too bad there were no increases in computing power during those 10 years that, in every other industry in America, allowed fewer white collar employees to process more paperwork! ... Seriously, imagine someone at G.E. or PayPal making this argument. "Help! We're handling more paperwork now with fewer people than a decade ago!" They'd be laughed at, if not RIFfed. ...
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**--This sentence originally said "Washington, D.C. real estate isn't suffering." While D.C. apparently did relatively well in the real estate bust compared with other cities, and has emerged in better shape, prices have still dropped sharply and continuously since 2006. ... The forecast for the D.C. labor market is also substantially better than for other regions of the country. ... [Thanks to reader J.S. for the correction.] 8:01 P.M.
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Did Dr. Sanjay Gupta really say he opted out of the Surgeon General's job to 'spend more time with his family'? ("He has removed himself from consideration to focus more on his medical career and his family.") Doesn't he know the phrase is a punch line, not an explanation? ... And won't he be spending pretty much the same amount of time with his family, since he's, you know, not changing his job? ... 7:59 P.M.
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Has L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa accidentally revealed the real reason why politicians are worried about the decline of the MSM?
I have press conferences where reporters don't show up anymore - it's just (TV) cameras. It's scary....A regular day would be six, seven cameras ... (Now) you get five on a great day ... [E.A.]
And what if the cameras go away too? It would be tragic if Villaraigosa had to figure out a way to govern other than by feeding the MSM a diet of staged events. ... 7:54 P.M.
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So it was Begala and Carville's idea for the White House to go after Rush Limbaugh? Hmm. No one can read Bob Woodward's The Agenda and go away impressed with Begala's judgment. He's overcombative and underadaptive. And weren't he and Carville Hillary people? So why is Obama letting these underemployed publicity-craving operatives mess around with his Presidency? ... 4:18 P.M.
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Can't say Fire Mickey Kaus doesn't have me here. 4:28 P.M.
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I like the idea of Sen. Specter facing a challenge from the right in the GOP primary--it might encourage him to avoid supporting "card check." But couldn't Specter pull a Lieberman and run as some kind of independent? Wouldn't he have a good shot at winning? ... Update: The Hill reports that under Pennsylvania law Specter can't do exactly what Lieberman did, which is lose his party's primary and then run anyway as an independent in the general. He can run as an independent, but he has to decide beforehand to skip the primary and let the GOP nominate someone else. ... P.S.: When does he have to decide, though? Once Specter's committed to the GOP primary then the pressure is back on, no? ... P.P.S.: The Hill offers mixed opinions as to whether he could win as an independent. ... [Thks to alert reader J.] 4:05 P.M.
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Starving Stuffing the Beast: Ross Douthat thinks he knows what Obama is up to--he's pursuing the opposite of Bush's "starve the beast" policy, which sought to limit future spending by denying government revenues. Obama, the theory goes, is trying to cram as much spending as possible into the budget, knowing full well it's not paid for:
Obama's spending proposals would ... create new spending commitments and run up large deficits, in the hopes that the dollars poured into health care and education will create a new baseline for government's obligations, which in turn will create the political space for tax increases on the middle class. Like the starve-the-beast approach, the Obama strategy puts off the hard part till tomorrow: Give them tax cuts today, conservatives said, and they'll swallow spending cuts tomorrow; give them universal health care, universal pre-K, subsidies for green industry and all the rest of it today, liberals seem to be thinking, and they'll be willing to pay for it tomorrow. ...
[I]f you can change the baseline of social spending that Americans expect from their government before that day of hard choices arrive - and once created, government programs are awfully hard to get rid of, whether they're actually effective or not - then you've tilted the landscape of negotiation in liberalism's favor, and ensured that a post-Obama entitlement compromise will look a lot more like social democracy than a pre-Obama compromise would have.
What would be wrong with a "stuff the beast" strategy? It's disingenuous--but what of that, if the end result is progress? And if the result of Obama's strategy would be only a) universal health care, unversal pre-K, and green industries and b) higher taxes to pay for them, maybe near-unalloyed progress is what it would bring. But there are three obvious questions for the beast-stuffers:
1) What parts of government are expanded--the effective parts or the BS parts? If you read the MSM or commentators like Jon Chait, you get the impression that long-suppressed Dem "priorities" are satisfied by mindlessly in a Congress-pleasing manner expanding all agencies of government by, say, 15%. That certainly seems to be the animating philosophy of the just-passed stimulus and about-to-pass "omnibus" spending bills. There was, for example, this chilling sentence in a recent WaPo piece on the stimulus:
Processing the rush of money is complicated by requirements unique to the stimulus act. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is getting $1.5 billion for "homelessness prevention," a task in which it has never explicitly engaged.
Do you have any confidence that HUD, an agency that has done more to destroy American cities than crack cocaine, will spend this $1.5 billion, without toxic side effects, in a way that significanty reduces homelessness--as opposed to sustains myriad HUD grantees, and community organizations, and (of course) bureaucrats? True, all spending is stimulative--and those grantees will in turn be spending the $1.5 billion somewhere. But if you were actually prioritizing government programs, as opposed to giving every agency its due, is this $1.5 billion you'd budget? I doubt it. It's not "waste," exactly. It's just inefficient and ineffective (at best). Mulitiply this problem across the Veteran's Administration and the Agriculture Department and the Labor Department and you get the picture.
2) If the spending isn't effective, is the spending at least reversible? Tax cuts may be less stimulative than direct spending, as Paul Krugman and others argue (in part because taxpayers may save the cuts instead of spending them). But tax cuts have one obvious virtue--unlike spending, they are relatively easy to reverse when the economy recovers and Keynes-style stimulus isn't needed. Indeed, Obama is in the process of rescinding a bunch of tax cuts--Bush's--now. Actually cutting spending on specific programs, once it's been incorporated into the budget, is excruciatingly difficult at best. In particular cases it may be possible. But a large across the board reduction over time at the federal level has basically never been accomplished. Not even by Reagan.
There were probably several ways to make the "stimulus" spending reversible. Obama could have started up special, new free-standing programs, as FDR did with the WPA, designating them explicitly as temporary. Then you could kill them before they accreted a big constituency. Or, Robert Samuelson argues, it would have been better if Congress had done most of its spending through "large, temporary block grants to states and localities and letting them decide how to spend the money." Block grants can be cut--in this context they'd be akin to revenue sharing, a Nixon-era program that, unlike HUD, has disappeared.
But that's not what Obama and Pelosi did, Samuelson notes:
Instead, the stimulus provides most funds through specific programs. There's $90 billion more for Medicaid, $12 billion for special education, $2.8 billion for various policing programs. ... "Temporary" spending increases for specific programs, as opposed to block grants, will be harder to undo, worsening the long-term budget outlook.
So a good chunk of the spending increases will be permanent. Why should liberals care? Because they desperately need to make room for necessary new programs like universal health care. Does Obama think he can spend a couple of percentages of GDP on generalized Congressionally-directed federal bloat and then build a huge national health care structure on top of that? At some point, you run out of GDP, no? Every bilion dollars of low-priority government that Obama cements into the federal structure is a billion dollars he won't be able to spend on health care (and Social Security, and supplemental pensions) unless he raises taxes to pay for it. And there are limits, political and economic, to how much taxes can be raised. We don't want to reach them.
3) Does the spending serve the ends of liberalism? Reihan Salam flags a chart posted by Matthew Yglesias showing that other nations have reduced economic inequality more through their spending than through taxation, however progressive. Netherlands cut .1 off the Gini coefficient of inequality! Finland cut .15! If your idea of the goal of liberalism is reducing money inequality, these achievements will be very exciting for you, as they apparently are for Yglesias. But we'll never get rid of money inequality. Democrats probably won't even succeed in reversing the decades-long trend to greater money inequality in the U.S. Is money equality all that liberals are trying for? I've argued no, that economic inequality is only an interstitial goal in liberals' overarching drive to prevent income differences from creating invidious social differences--i.e. the goal of achieving social equality despite money inequality.
If that's the goal, it gives us another reason to think that all federal "spending"--even relatively effective, non-"wasteful" spending--is not alike. I happen to believe there will be a huge social equality payoff if the vast majority of Americans are in the same health care system. Any such system that provides good care--a necessity if the affluent are going to buy into it--will be very expensive. But it will be worth it. The equivalent spending on the Commerce Department or Community Development Block Grants or HUD or the Veteran's Administration or farm subsidies--well, not such a big social equality payoff, even though there might be a money equality payoff in Yglesias' chart. Even valued check-mailing programs like Social Security, beyond a certain point, don't do much for social equality. The checks are a good thing. They even reinforce the common value of work. But they don't erase invidious economic differences the way actually sitting around in the same hospital waiting room does.
Stuff the beast? OK. But I can't help but feel that Obama's been stuffing it with a lot of non-nutritious filler.
[I reserve the right ro revise and extend, including tinkering with tricky beast-digestion metaphor.]
Backfill--Beast on Beast Action: Matt Miller had the basic reverse-beast-starve mechanism pegged a week ago, but tragically called it "Feed the Beauty." (He approves of it.) ... 6:05 P.M.
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Will Congressional Democrats kill the D.C. voucher program? It's William McGurn's skillful deployment of victims vs. Democratic dogma--and I think the Obama administration just blinked, at least a bit.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday that poor children getting vouchers to attend private schools in the District of Columbia should be allowed to stay there, putting the Obama administration at odds with Democrats trying to end the program.
Duncan opposes vouchers, he said in an interview with The Associated Press. But he said Washington is a special case, and kids already in private schools on the public dime should be allowed to continue.
"I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," Duncan told said. "I think those kids need to stay in their school."
Eduwonk has context and perspective--noting that even in D.C. vouchers aren't where the action is. ("[I]t's the public charters not the vouchers that are taking over.") ... Update: Edspresso isn't impressed. ... P.S.: Of course, McGurn is working the Take Away Rule, which holds that it's always harder for politicians to take something away from someone than it is to not give it to them in the first place. In the vast majority of circumstances, this principle favors government-expanding liberals, since it makes any federal spending near-impossible to cut (especially if there are telegenic victims, as here). It's what will make Pelosi's "temporary" stimulus spending permanent. I don't blame McGurn for turning this powerful weapon against Democrats. Still, it would overwhlemingly be in conservatives' interest if the weapon no longer worked. That's obviously not the case. ... 12:51 P.M.
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Can the median price of a house in Detroit really be ... $7,500? Says here. ... P.S.: Also
There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters
In a town of 800,000?** ... Update: This housing price site suggests it was closer to $79,000 four months ago. Hard to believe it's fallen 90% since. [Thanks to reader S.B.] ... But: That site includes suburbs. The figure for Detroit itself is undoubtedly much lower. See, for example, this MSNBC report:
Overall, the residential real estate market is catastrophic, with the Detroit Board of Realtors now pegging the average price of a home in the city at $18,513.
[Thanks to reader S.E.] ... More: Newman's Own investigates:
For the three months that ended in January, according to Trulia, the median sales price was $10,000. Slightly higher, but still shocking.
**--Too Good to Check? Reader M.F. notes a Kroger at 14383 Gratiot Ave. That's one. Nope. Kroger sold this store, apparently. ...4:41 P.M.
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kf, Unions Don't Deliver: In the free-for-all race to fill Rahm Emanuel's House seat, the Service Workers International Union (SEIU) backed one candidate. The AFL-CIO backed another. They both lost! So, unfortunately, did Tom Geoghegan. ... P.S.: An endorsement from the dead tree Tribune still seems to be worth a lot. ... [via NewsAlert] 1:53 A.M.
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GM's best argument against bankruptcy has been that once consumers thought the company was bankrupt, they'd abandon the brand and its sales would fall "off a cliff." Well, GM sales have now fallen 53% while it dickers with the Obama administration. How much worse could bankruptcy be? ...
Yes, other carmakers' sales fell too, even Honda's and Toyota's, which--according to one investment analyst quoted by the Times--shows that there's not a GM problem but an industry-wide problem. This supposedly"reinforces the industry’s case in Washington that the unprecedented industry conditions should justify a continued federal bailout." I'm not so sure.
1) The other companies didn't fall as precipitously as GM. Honda fell 38%, for example, Toyota, 40%. There is also the question of price: Hapless Chrysler fell only 44%, but that's after giving unprecedented incentives, amounting to a 20% price cut, according to the NYT. Sales don't mean that much if you're giving the cars away.
2) What does the (milder) slowdown at GM's competitors have to do with GM's bailout, exactly? The company is broke. It would ordinarily go bankrupt, giving a judge power to rescind union contracts, screw creditors etc. The argument against such a bankruptcy is that sales would fall. But it turns out sales can hardly fall that much more. QED, no? It seems like an absolute-number question not a relative-number question. Regardless of what's happening at non-bankrupt Toyota, GM's plummeting sales make it a relatively good time to go the bankruptcy route. It's not as if a banner month for industry-wide auto sales is looming on the horizon. ...
P.S.: I'm not sure consumers wouldn't have more confidence in a car made by a GM-in-bankruptcy, in which the sharp decisions necessary for survival were being made, than in the current GM-in-political-limbo, in which all parties are trying to appeal for White House billions to postpone those decisions as long as possible (while sales crater anyway). Which company is more likely to be around in 10 years? ... 2:32 P.M.
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L.A.'s fifteen City Council members make $178,000 per year, way more than in New York ($112K) or Chicago ($110K). They have 320 staffers between them, they get free cars, plus taxpayer-financed $100,000 slush funds to dispense as they choose to local organizations. They don't have to feed parking meters! Plus they have approximately zero fear of not being reelected. ... Despite that, or maybe because of it, they do a lousy job, argues L.A. Weekly in an impressive full-frontal assault that takes some cheap shots and some not-cheap ones:
The members admit that they never discussed what a digital billboard was, or its intrusive impact, before quickly approving them citywide; ...[M]any now admit they had no idea what made up the $1 billion to $3.6 billion solar plan, Measure B, but stuck it on [this] week's ballot anyway. ... They squabbled over selling valuable city land throughout the run-up in land values, and now that they're desperate for funds, council members plan to hold an embarrassing fire sale of the public's land.
Needless to say, the city's giant budget deficit is driven in large part by "increases in employee pay and benefits". [LAT via LAO] ... More generally, in part due to L.A.'s weak-mayor/strong council system, residents have little sense that the development (or overdevelopment) of L.A. is under any kind of intelligible control. It seems as if everything's a favor handed out by individual councilpersons--an impression reinforced by the Weekly. ... P.S.: If you are part of kf's coveted Beverly Hills demographic, my mother says to vote for Mirisch. I note only that she is an excellent judge of character.. ... 10:57 P.M.
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Mike Allen buries the lede:
In the end, Obama believes, forward motion on his agenda matters more than any details.
“Even if we’re busting the budget, we’ve got to solve some of these problems,” said a member of his inner circle. “I’d rather live with a debt than have people go without health care.” [E.A.]
Aha. ... And here I almost believed Obama's health care plans were all about lowering costs and getting the budget under control. ... 2:48 P.M.
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HuffPo 1, NYT 0: Sam Stein on the possibility of Dem Senate defections on "card check." Don't tell NYT designated labor spinnee Steven Greenhouse!
A senior official involved in getting EFCA passed into law said he was underwhelmed but not surprised by the support being offered for this union priority from the White House ...
P.S.--J-School Extra Credit Assignment: Compare Stein's article, in the biased, amateur-filled Huffington Post, with Greenhouse's article in the venerable and highly professional New York Times. They aren't in the same ballpark in terms of a) sophistication and b) reporting on the actual situation. Could Greenhouse even get a job at HuffPo? ... P.P.S.: Stein's story could serve a pro-labor function, of course, by focusing union-led pressure on potential defectors Bayh, Landrieu, Baucus, and Nelson. ... 12:26 P.M.
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Up-to-the-second twitters on the Illinois-5 Congressional race: Geoghegan's been endorsed by the prestigious Hideout bar. ... 12:12 P.M.
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E.J. Dionne on Obama's budget:
The central issue in American politics now is whether the country should reverse a three-decade long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth.
Hmm. Does Dionne think Obama's budget will "reverse a three-decade long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth"? As opposed to making the trend slightly less inegalitarian than it would otherwise be? I'd like to see the calculation.
A "reverse" in the decades-long inequality trend would be an impressive feat for what is only a rise of 4.6% in the top tax rate (from 35% to 39.6 percent) plus a modest rise in the capital gains rate and some reduced deductions. Isn't it more likely that whether inequality rises will still depend on trends in before-tax incomes--i.e. the underlying economy--which tend to swamp modest shifts in how those incomes are taxed? And if economic health returns, why would we expect the rich to stop getting as rich, before taxes, as they've been getting?
Maybe Obama's biggest feat of salesmanship** will have been convincing starry-eyed Money Liberals like Dionne that he's grandly reversing the inequality trend, when he's really doing something much more modest and realistic (e.g., funding some important new benefits by raising some taxes on top earners). ...
**--Obama's helped here, of course, by the alarmist right, which also has an interest in exaggerating the distributive impact of his budget. ... 2:17 A.M.
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"Card Check" Cocooning? Steven Greenhouse reports organized labor isn't worried about Obama's commitment to "card check" bill:
... [M]r. Obama has signaled he will push for legislation that would expand labor's thinned ranks by making it far easier to unionize workers. Labor leaders expect Vice President Joseph Biden to spell out the administration's battle plans for the bill on Thursday, when he is scheduled to speak at the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s winter meeting in Miami Beach.
Any doubts that union leaders might have had about Mr. Obama dissolved several weeks ago when, in announcing a new Task Force on the Middle Class, he said: "I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, it's part of the solution. You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement." ...
Mr. Johnson, of the Chamber of Commerce, denounced the bill, saying, “The idea of radically changing employment law when companies are trying to dig themselves out of a hole is ludicrous.”
But Mr. Obama disagreed, telling regional newspaper reporters last month: “I don’t buy the argument that providing workers with collective-bargaining rights somehow weakens the economy or worsens the business environment. If you’ve got workers who have decent pay and benefits, they’re also customers for business.” If there is one area where labor remains uneasy with Mr. Obama, it is trade policy. ... [E.A.]
This seems like chearleaderish pro-"card check" optimism. Yes, Obama clearly supports unions. But does he clearly support the "Employee Free Choice Act," the bill he co-sponsored as a Senator? The general pro-labor sentiments Greenhouse quotes don't make that case. For example, the Detroit Freep's summary of Obama's regional paper interview contained this passage, left out of both the AFL-CIO's account and Greenhouse's:
He said he hoped to see in coming weeks forces on both sides talk about common ground which could be reached on the legislation.
The Philadelphia Inquirer's account continued this passage, also left out of the AFL-CIO's account and Greenhouses's:
At the same time, Obama said business had legitimate concerns. He said he would like to see labor and business groups work together on a compromise.
"Whether those conversations can bear fruit over the next several months, we'll see," he said. "But I'm always a big believer in before we gear up for some tooth-and-nail battle, that we see if some accommodations can't be found."
If you are really 'pushing' for legislation, do you start by calling for compromise? The unions may effectively win the card check fight--either through a tooth-and-nail battle or a pro-union revision. But unless they are immune to ordinary human anxiety--or have received some private assurance from Obama not reported by Greenhouse--I suspect they have 'doubts' and are 'uneasy.' As are their opponents. ...
Update: Carter Wood suggests that if Obama were 100% for card check, he'd still encourage uncertainty about his position--
Given the faltering support in Congress for card check, strategic ambiguity serves the advocates best.
How to tell real uncertainty from strategic uncertainty? [Blind quotes from aides!--ed Greenhouse has none of those.] 12:49 A.M.
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If you see a banker with a vacuum cleaner, watch out: A friend took me to a fancy West L.A. fundraising event recently. Lots of very, very affluent people--mainly youngish couples, mainly investment bankers. There was some whispering about one particular glittering husband and wife team. "They have no help. ... Can you believe it?" Yes, I can believe it. Ask Nancy Killifer! It's not easy to employ "help" both a) efficiently and b) completely correctly, from a legal and tax standpoint--i.e., in a way that couldn't surface at an unfortunate time (say a Senate confirmation hearing). I tried it once, in D.C.. After paying Social Security taxes and Unemployment Comp and Workers Comp, I'm sure I left a few things out.
Is "having no help" the new sign of political ambition? Democracy works to produce social equality in mysterious ways. ... 12:35 P.M.
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Italian carmaker FIAT tests to make sure its latest compact will uphold the company's North American reputation! ... See also. ... [via Autoblog] 12:23 A.M.
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