Kausfiles: A mostly political weblog.

Well, all right then!

Vote of confidence: Auto czarito Rattner "not likely" to face charges, says Obama spokesman. ... 3:18 P.M.

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New Dem Health Care Pitch: "We'll Deny Treatment!"

Democratic blogger Ezra Klein appears to be positioning Dem health care reforms as a way to cut costs, on the grounds that a reformed system will be able to make "hard choices" and "rational" coverage decisions, by which Klein seems to mean "not providing" treatments that are unproven or too expensive--when "a person's life, or health, is not worth the price." Matthew Yglesias' recent post seems to be saying the same thing, though clarity isn't its strong suit. (He must have left it on Journolist.)  

Isn't it an epic mistake to try to sell Democratic health care reform on this basis? Possible sales pitch: "Our plan will deny you unnecessary treatments!" Or maybe just "Republicans say 'yes.' Democrats say 'no'!" Is that really why the middle class will sign on to a revolutionary multi-trillion dollar shift in spending--so the government can decide their life or health "is not worth the price"?  I mean, how could it lose?

The "rational," cost-cutting, "hard-choices" pitch isn't just awful marketing--I don't even think it's accurate. Put it this way: I'm for universal health care in large part precisely because I think the government will be less tough-minded and cost-conscious when it comes to the inevitable rationing of care than for-profit insurance companies will be. Take Arnold Kling's example of a young patient with cancer, where "the best hope is a treatment that costs $100,000 and offers a chance of success of 1 in 200." No "rational bureaucracy" would spend $20 million to save a life, Kling argues. I doubt any private insurance company is going to write a policy that spends $20 million to save a life.  But I think the government--faced with demands from patient groups and disease lobbies and treatment providers and Oprah and run, ultimately, by politicians as terrified of being held responsible for denying treatment as they are quick to pander to the public's sentimental bias toward life--is less likely to be "rational" than the private sector.

That is to say, the government's more likely to pay for the treatment (assuming a doctor recommends it). So it's government for me.  

Now, I understand that President Obama has chosen to sell his health care plan in the current budget as a way to control costs. How else to even colorably bill it as a policy response to the immediate economic crisis?  That it won't control costs seemed, initially, to be merely disingenuous--and what's a little deception if that's what it takes to get a good universal health care law passed? But on second thought, Obama's strategy isn't just disingenuous. In the not-so-long run it's ineffective, a political loser.  

Didn't universal health coverage gain traction during the anti-HMO era, when voters began to see private-sector cost-cutting bureaucrats override the decisions of doctors to provide drugs and treatments to their patients? The evil HMOs tried to kick new mothers out of the hospital after a day! Politicians responded with laws mandating treatment, with a "patients' bill of rights," etc. But now, through a heroic, concerted effort at self-congratulatory Obamaist groupthink, the Dems are about to cast the government in the cost-cutting, treatment denying role and put themselves on the side of the heartless bureaucratic bean counters.  

More broadly, haven't liberals historically prospered when they promised and delivered more for the average American (more Social Security, health security, prosperity, clean air) in exchange for increased spending? Why not try the same with health care? Give pandering a chance. ... 2:49 A.M.

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90% B.S.

90% BS: Obama's claim that  

"more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border"

appears to be deceptively hyped, at best. (The 90% figure only covers the guns that are sent to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fireams for testing. There seems little reason to assume it is a representative sample of all the "guns recovered in Mexico"). But is the suspect factoid really designed to "weaken the Second Amendment" and promote gun control, as the NRA charges? Or is it just convenient diplomatic BS because it allows the United States to be partly blamed for Mexico's embarrassing inability to control its violent drug cartels?  (True, you'd think it would be unnecessary, since the U.S., as the consumer of the illegal drugs the cartels sell, is already partly to blame.)  ... 

Update: Obama's stat has now received the Official Annenberg Seal of B.S. from FactCheck.Org, which notes: 

the guns that ATF is given to trace are far from a random sample of all guns recovered. Indeed, it omits those that Mexican officials have reason to believe come from elsewhere, and includes only those guns with a good chance of being traced to U.S. sources.

FactCheck's seemingly thorough analysis concludes an accurate estimate would be "probably less than half of the 90 percent claimed by the president and others in his administration." But then we'd have less to apologize for! ... [via Insta via Andrew Malcolm] 1:06 P.M.

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Screwing the Chooch: Did auto czarito Steven Rattner pay to play at his investment fund?... With the GM and Chrysler auto negotiations at their current critical stage, isn't he too big to fail--the Geithner Put? ... P.S.: In what may be an admirable display of independence, the NYT's story makes Rattner--a former Times reporter and buddy of Times CEO Pinch Sulzberger--seem more potentially culpable than the WSJ's story does. Formally, if the accusations are true, Rattner would merely be the shakedownee in the pension fund deal in question. But the Times makes it seem as if he aggressively plunged ahead in what was allegedly a seamy business. [More 'allegedly's?-ed. Think I'm OK] ... Bonus Question: How many vetting problems make a "handful"? ... P.P.S.: How bad is "Chooch," the 2003 film Rattner's firm (allegedly) indirectly bought as part of the complicated financial machinations? Pretty bad, said the NYT. But according to the Village Voice it "charms with its p.c. portrayal of Italian Americans" and "rebuilds cultural bridges." So there. ... 

Update: One of Rattner's "handful" of vetting problems was his conflict of interest due to previous dealings with Chrysler's owner, Cerberus. Jane Hamsher says 

Rattner's Quadrangle has a financial relationship with Cerberus, having loaned them $125 million to buy the Maxim and Blender magazine parent two years ago (Cerberus is currently in default). 

That's wrong. But close! It's Cerberus that loaned the money to Rattner's firm, not the other way around (see link). Hamsher's error is repeated and amplified by TPM's Moe Tkacik,  (Journolist synergy?) If Hamsher, who's well-connected with the labor movement, and Tkacik have it in for Rattner, maybe he really is the right guy for the auto bailout job--i.e. the guy who might force the UAW, as well as Detroit's bondholder's, back to reality. (Contra Hamsher, it's not "a national moral outrage that [UAW members] should expect to make $33 an hour in this day and age." The problem is expecting to keep making $33 when your firm is going bankrupt.) ...  10:34  P.M.

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Ambassador Kantor Not So Diplomatic

Yesterday's Lede: Far from being a man competent enough to run the fight against Taliban extremists, Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari is "not the man [you want] to run the meal at your home in the evening," said former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor at a conference on the Obama presidency at USC yesterday.  Kantor suggested that the best thing would be for Pakistan's military to "reassert" control. ... #2 Lede from the conference: Conservatives with money are talking about starting a right wing imitation of Huffington Post. ...1:53 A.M.

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kf Out-Paranoids the Paranoids

Defending Robert Samuelson's attack on Dem health care plan and Obama's "post-material" economy, blogger D.A. argues that it's only "an aspirational preference" for "everyone to be insured." In other words, it's not a preference people would make spending "their own money in the absence of compulsion by the government." ... I think I like aspirational preferences. "All men are created equal" seems like an aspirational preference. Can't buy it at the mall. It seems like it would be hard to achieve any desirable form of equality--equality before the law, equality of opportunity, or social equality--simply by aggregating the choices of individuals spending their own money.  ... 1:08 A.M.

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Did John McTiernan Make the Wrong Self-Serving Paranoid Conspiracy Film? Die Hard director John McTiernan, who pled guilty, withdrew his plea, and is now awaiting potential indictment in the Anthony Pellicano scandal, has apparently made a film blaming Karl Rove for pursuing Pellicano. The theory? According to the NYT, McTiernan sees

the Pellicano prosecution as having stemmed from a pre-emptive strike against a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential candidacy.

Mrs. Clinton, the film says, was widely reported to have had help from Mr. Pellicano when her husband was accused in 1992 of having had an affair with Gennifer Flowers.

According to an elaborate turn of events asserted in the documentary, the Pellicano prosecution was intended to churn up dirt that was then folded into an anti-Clinton campaign video that was planned for use if she were nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate.

I'd say McTiernan's thinking too small! If I were making a paranoid conspiracy documentary about Rove and Pellicano, I wouldn't focus on Hillary. I'd focus generally on the "thousands of hours of encoded tapes from wiretaps" the FBI supposedly found when they raided Pellicano's office. Who knows who is on those tapes? Lots of Hollywood bigshots, presumably. Whoever has those tapes might, in this conspiracy theory, be able to blackmail half the big showbiz donors to the Democratic party--donors to Hillary and Obama. Of course, the tapes were in the possession of government law enforcement officals--not Bush operatives. But, hey, would that have stopped Richard Nixon or John Mitchell? We're making a crazy film here!  ... I know when I heard about the stash of tapes, I began to drool (figuratively). And I'm not Karl Rove. ... 12:20 A.M

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Headline in WSJ: "Emanuel Now a Backer of Immigration Action" The evidence?

For his part, Mr. [Rahm] Emanuel said his views haven't changed, though people may be viewing him in a new light now. In any case, he said, his job now was to represent the president's views.

"It doesn't matter what Rahm thinks," he said in an interview. "It matters what President Obama thinks." [E.A.]

Yes, sounds like he's had a total change of heart! ... 12:18 A.M.

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Even Tim Noah is Kidding Himself About Health Care Costs

Some of these (more electronic recordkeeping, more preventive care, tighter restrictions on malpractice litigation) would be worthwhile even if they didn't save money. Others methods [such as "best practices" protocols] risk creating more problems than they solve. But the bottom line is that the insurers' basket of proposals would not, even by their own reckoning, cut health care costs; instead, they would cut the rate of growth in health care spending by 6 percent to 7 percent.  

Therefore, c)

If you really want to rein in health care costs, then consensus reform options like creating a comparative effectiveness board won't get you very far. For the true spending hawk, I see no practical alternative to the "socialist" public option.

First, just because rising health care costs have eaten up all of the average American's wage increases, it does not necessarily follow that either this rise was unwarranted or that health care costs need to be controlled. Maybe Americans, like richer people everywhere, want to spend more money on health care (as opposed to, say, newspapers) and advances in health care have given them more valuable services to purchase (or have their employers purchase for them). That's probably not true--and almost certainly not 100% true--but you can't tell it just by looking at Noah's big graph. (Nor do I understand Robert Samuelson's column, which seems to argue that because health care is not "material" it isn't a valuable service and can't be the basis for capitalistic economic growth.)  If the graph showed that rising expenditures on computer technology had eaten up all the increase in Americans' paychecks, would we immediately declare a "computer cost crisis" and demand that rising laptop expenditures be constrained? Or would we say, "Hey, people are spending a lot more on computers these days"?

Second, the savings you get from the "public option"--savings on marketing and administrative costs, ability to use the massive purchasing power of the government to bid down prices--seem like one-shot propositions. We switch to a public plan, we save our 20-30 percent on administration and bargaining, and then the rise in health care costs resumes, thanks to ever-fancier technology and complex treatments (that actually are effective--just expensive). Soon costs have eaten up the 20-30 percent and are back on a rising path to consume a growing share of GDP, no? 

The lesson I would draw isn't that we shouldn't try to reform health care, or that we shouldn't try to reduce costs. It's that we shouldn't reform health care in order to reduce costs, and that we shouldn't expect health care reform to in itself control the health care entitlement problem that's scheduled to devour the budget. We should reform health care to provide long life, security and peace of mind to Americans, while we resign ourselves to the likelihood that this will consume an ever-larger portion of our economy.  1:44 A.M.

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Brendan Loy:  

Does Mickey Kaus really think that low-wage workers in Mexico and Central America play this much attention to... [the progress of amnesty plans in Washington]  

Um ... yeah! That is, they hear the news, perhaps false news, that legalization is or is not in the offing. Why wouldn't they pay more attention than the average American? The news affects them more directly, no? (If you look at Spanish-language papers in the U.S, certainly, you'll notice a rather intense focus on immigration-related developments, especially the possibility of legalization.) ... 1:42 A.M.

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kausfiles, the Golden, Assaultive Years!

Paranoid's Corner--Come and Be Counted! Why Obama might want to reverse the Gran Salida: Why might the Obama administration want to raise the topic of possible immigrant mass legalization even if it's not going to happen this year? Even if you assume such talk encourages more people to come here illegally--in the hope of qualifying for the amnesty--or at least discourages illegals currently in the country from going home during the recession, what good would that do Democrats? Illegal immigrants can't vote.  ... It's not as if there is a once-every-10-years Census starting up in which areas with more illegals will get more money and representation! ... From CNS:

The Census is used to apportion the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. There are 435 House seats that are divided among the states in proportion to their population, which is determined by the decennial census. States with more people get more seats in the U.S. House.

This means that a state harboring more illegal aliens can gain more House seats as long as the Census Bureau finds the illegal aliens and counts them. This also means that the illegal alien population resident in the United States during a census year has the potential to alter the regional and philosophical balance of power in Congress.

P.S.: Note that it doesn't matter, for this purpose, if press secretary Robert Gibbs knocks down aide Cecilia Munoz's talk of impending amnesty--as long as Munoz's message gets out to the "undocumented" immigrant community (and the potential undocumented immigrant community in Latin America and elsewhere). ... 1:33  A.M.

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Three obvious problems with Ramesh Ponnuru's op-ed making an argument against universal health coverage:

1)

For people with pre-existing health problems, for example, direct subsidies would probably be more efficient than rigging insurance markets to make sure they are covered ...

So for every potential illness, the government has to determine the amount of subsidy required. As you get older and acquire more illnesses, you acquire more and more subsidies, like barnacles. But why should someone with mild heart trouble get the same subsidy as someone with severe heart trouble? Won't insurers make money by figuring out ways to subtly discourage potential customers with the worse versions of subsidized illnesses? It seems simpler and less bureaucratic just to cover everyone, stick in a decent co-pay, and then pay the bills.

But Ponnuru has a second solution for "preexisting conditions:"

[I]n the long run, the option to buy renewable policies that people could take from job to job would keep most people from needing to face this problem.

A renewable policy the insurer couldn't cancel even if you got an expensive disease? That would be a policy you'd have to hold on to. It sounds like Ponnuru has solved the problem of employees locked into their jobs and replaced it with the problem of employees locked into their insurance companies. If you're stuck with one company, that would seem to defeat the purpose of private sector "competition." If, on the other hand, other companies have to cover you at a rate that ignores your "pre-existing condition," that would reintroduce all the market-distorting cost-shifting Ponnuru is trying to avoid, no? Maybe I'm missing something.

2)

An alternative approach would be to make it easier for people to buy insurance that isn’t tied to their employment. The existing tax break for employer-provided insurance could be replaced with a tax credit that applies to insurance purchased either inside or outside the workplace. At the same time, state mandates that require insurers to cover certain conditions, which make it expensive to offer individual policies, could be removed.

These two reforms would address most people’s anxieties about the health care system.

Not mine! My biggest anxiety is that when I need insurance I'll discover that my private insurance company has stuck in some fine print that cleverly gets them off the hook for paying to treat whatever condition I have. Ponnuru's system seems designed to maximize this anxiety, not eliminate it (since he specifically rejects the idea that the "government specify what constitutes adequate coverage.")

3)

The third complaint against free-market health insurance is that it wouldn’t cover absolutely everyone, because it would neither force people to buy insurance nor require the government to provide it. ... [snip]

For most people, though, especially those in the middle class, it would mean paying less for health insurance. Some people, of course, would still choose to go without it. But that would be their call, as it should be in a free country.

Their call? If they make their "call" against being covered, we aren't going to leave them bleeding on the sidewalk because they don't have insurance. We are going to give them medical care and pay for it ... somehow. Maybe, as Ponnuru claims, this "free rider" problem isn't as large in dollar terms as is generally assumed. But using the bracing language of liberty and individual responsibility seems inappropriate when the "choice" is really a choice to foist society with the cost. ... 1:33  A.M.

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All those broken windows were kind of cool ... The NYT celebrates the "golden, assaultive years" of subway graffiti. ... Doesn't the Times know that graffiti artists are "the performing spray can monkeys for gentrification?" ... 12:56 A.M.

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Fire Mickey Kaus misses joke! Hahahaha! Mickey Kaus one step ahead of Fire Mickey Kaus! Fire Fire Mickey Kaus! ... 12:43 A.M.

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Obama to Potential Illegals: Arrive Now, Get Legalized Later

Will Obama's New Legalization Push Screw American Workers? Or Has It Already Screwed Them? Both supporters and opponents of illegal immigrant legalization think trying to pass it "while the U.S. economy is mired in economic turmoil" might be difficult. The fear/expectation is that Americans will see the new law as a plan to allow foreigners who aren't supposed to be here to compete for the few jobs that are left, bidding down wages in the process. But here's the thing: Just by re-opening the legalization issue, without passing any new law, Obama has already encouraged foreigners who aren't supposed to be here to come and compete for the few jobs that are left, bidding down wages in the process. What better way to encourage more illegal immigration than by promising a possible amnesty in the next few years?

This incentive is especially strong, actually, if immigrants (not unreasonably) think it really will take years to write and enact a legalization bill. Suppose, for example, that Congress passes a bill in the late summer of 2010. There will be a cutoff, of course--if you entered the country illegally after a certain date, you wouldn't qualify for the amnesty. But what date? It if the bill doesn't pass until mid- 2010 there's a good chance that the cutoff date will be sometime around the end of 2009, if not later. (The last legalization plan, the "Z-Visa" debated in May of 2007, had a cutoff of January 1, 2007.). That means if you are now in Mexico or Central America and you can make it across the border in the next few months, you're likely to qualify for legalization. The longer Congress takes, of course, and the sooner you come, the better the chance you'll have of beating the cutoff. Obama might as well print up leaflets that say

LEGALIZATION IS COMING. GET ACROSS THE RIO GRANDE NOW IF YOU WANT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS OFFER!

It's hard to believe Obama adviser Cecilia Munoz doesn't realize reopening the amnesty issue could have this effect.

In any case, low-wage American workers don't have to worry that Obama's immigration proposals might make it harder for them to feed their families. Obama already made it a bit harder to feed their families, yesterday, just by letting Munoz and others bring up the subject. The damage--at least some of it--has been done. The lowest-paid Americans can now expect more low-wage jobs to go to illegal immigrant workers attracted by the very prospect that illegal immigrant legalization will succeed.  ...

P.S.: CNN reports--after taking to "two senior administration officials"--that

the Obama administration wants to remove incentives to enter the U.S. illegally

Um, the easiest way to do that would have been to not put out yesterday's story. ...

P.P.S.: Gibbs vs. Munoz ...

At Thursday's White House briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested the front-page Times story was a bit overplayed. "Most of what I read today one could have written a year or so ago, based on what he said on the campaign trail. He told groups through 2007 and 2008 that the process on immigration reform would begin during his first year in office," Gibbs said. "I don’t think that he expects that it’ll be done this year. ..."

[Thanks to alert reader P.] 

Update: I'm not saying there's not a good chance of some form of legalization passing fairly soon. Sen. McCaskill of Missouri, previously a tough-on-immigration Dem, just announced she'd now "probably" vote for the so-called "DREAM Act," which would legalize illegals who entered the country before their 16th birthday and would have the effect of legalizing "25% of our total undocumented population," according to some proponents. (Do you think the government is going to deport the undocumented parents of the newly-legalized DREAM immigrants?) By some estimates, McCaskill could be the crucial 60th senator in favor of DREAM.  ... The DREAM Act (2007 version, 2009 version) required that "the alien has been physically present in the United States for a continuous period of not less than 5 years immediately preceding the date of enactment"--a cutoff that would, in theory, eliminate the incentive of potential illegals to cross the border now with their children in order to have those children qualify (assuming it didn't take Congress five years to pass the law).  But the prospect of DREAM's passage would discourage some illegal immigrants from returning home (which would breach the "continuous" presence requirement). Plus, there's always the possibility of the next DREAM Act, or DREAM Act extension, that would advance the cutoff date--why make a kid who's been here for only 4 years 'live in the shadows,' etc.. ... In any case, current administration talk hasn't been about the DREAM Act, but rather about a broader legalization program. ...[Correction: I've removed a sentence that ignored DREAM's five year cutoff.] ... [Thanks to reader J.].

Backfill: On the issue of whether talk of amnesty encourages more illegals to come, or to not leave, see this testimony and this report from the anti-legalization Center for Immigration Studies:

[T]he illegal immigrant population seems to have ticked up, grown somewhat if you will, during the debate over legalization or amnesty last year. And the figures show that after the amnesty failed, the numbers begin to fall pretty quickly.

1:42 A.M.

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Calling All Bond Villains

Bwa-Ha ... Hmm. If shooting particles in the air can semipermanently change the climate of the entire planet ... well, in the hands of well-meaning people it would be a risky, last-ditch policy to combat global warming. In the hands of less benevolent people it could become a heavy duty terrorist weapon, no? ... If you have the missiles, is it that much easier to develop nukes? ... Backfill: The WSJ, which used Dr. Evil to illustrate its February piece on geoengineering, relies on a Foreign Affairs article ("Geoengineering is an option at the disposal of any reasonably advanced nation. A single country could deploy geoengineering systems from its own territory without consulting the rest of the planet ..."). ... Rand Simberg says you wouldn't use missiles. But of course if you can't wreak havoc with a single discrete act like a missile launch, the terrorism would seem difficult to pull off.  If it takes a flotilla of planes operating around the clock for weeks, that operation could presumably be interrupted by military action. ...[Thanks to reader M.]  8:46 P.M.

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Why would you leave a recurring part on a hit TV show--a job you "loved" --to become a mid-level liaison official in the White House? Either you are crazy or you have huge political ambitions. Or both. ... 8:42 P.M.

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We Want Our Blogola And We Want It Now! According to Greg Sargent,

leading liberal bloggers are privately furious with the major progressive groups — and in some cases, the Democratic Party committees — for failing to spend money advertising on their sites, even as these groups constantly ask the bloggers for free assistance in driving their message.

Peter Bart of Variety had a solution for this problem! ... Update: It works for blogs too! ... 8:39 P.M..

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Will This Bloat Float?

39,000 New Pentagon Civil Servants are to be hired in the next five years, according to Defense Sec. Gates' plan. Many would replace private contractors overseeing military acquisitions--allegedly on the theory that this will help prevent over-budget, under-performing weapons systems. But not all the new full-time civil servants will be in acquisitions. Reports WaPo: 

Of the 13,000 private contractors to be replaced in the coming year, 2,500 of them would be in the acquisition workforce.

What about the other 10,500? ... Contractors can be fired, remember. Full-time civil servants are forever. Yet replacing the former with the latter seems to be a consistent theme of the new administration. Is this really Gates talking? Or is it Obama talking through Gates? Or is it AFSCME** talking through Obama through Gates? ... P.S.: The Post's ed board says "Democrats who say they support the president's expensive health-care and education programs" should support cuts in weapons systems that would free up money to pay for those programs. But, on the same grounds, shouldn't they also oppose permanent Pentagon bloat? ...

**--Or, when it comes to Pentagon workers, AFGE. ...12:42 A.M.

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The rehabilitation of Andrew Cuomo has been a heavy price to pay for the return of a few AIG bonuses. HuffPo's Thomas Edsall and Robert Dowling do their best to cut him back down, suggesting Cuomo may have tacitly approved, or at least enabled, the bonuses he later dramatically got returned. ... 12:24 A.M.

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'Employee Free Choice' Still on the Move! Yet another Democratic Senator, Michael Bennet of Colorado, declares "card check" unpassable. He also calls it an impediment to enacting health care reform--a potentially convenient "frame" for other wobbly Dems, Greg Sargent notes. ... P.S.: At some point doesn't the near-stampede of moderate Democrats to renounce the unions' top agenda item cut into labor's leverage when it comes to negotiating a compromise? Just asking! These Dems are defying labor. Are they paying a big price for it, or do they know labor needs them as much as they need labor? Lesson learned? ... P.P.S.: Didn't Robert Reich try to warn Andy Stern that this would happen? ... P.P.P.S.: Or is labor angling for a pity vote--they're about to be so humiliated, Dems will have to do something to help them? ... Update: Udall and Warner (!) seem to say they will vote for cloture. Of course, that's a bit of a 'free' vote now since cloture on the full-strength bill seems unlikely to get the necessary 60 votes (or even come up). Still, it makes it less of a stampede. ... Campaign Diaries' headcount seems a bit Ambinderesque--that is, optimistic, from labor's point of view. If they can get Feinstein and Bennet on cloture, then they only need two out of five other senators who "oppose the current version but haven't closed the door to compromise." Why would a senator 'close the door to compromise'? The question's still "which compromise?"  ...  12:03 A.M.

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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

60 in two? Really? Jennifer Rubin (citing Jay Newton-Small): Are we sure 2010 is a year for Dem Senate pickups? ... 11:40 P.M.

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Variety Was His Blog: Amy Wallace, whose 2001 profile of Peter Bart in Los Angeles Magazine became the sort of "industry" sensation the L.A. Times seems to never achieve, jumps in on Bart's upstairs-kicking with a juicy lunch anecdote (see end of page 1) that demonstrates why Bart had no business running Variety.. ... P.S.: It's another question whether a man who's a bag of conflicts and biases--and who gives them free range in his writing--should be covering anything anywhere. The answer is of course he should. But those ethics aren't the ethics of a man running a large conventional reporting staff. They're the ethics of a blogger. In the coming days it will probably become a cliche to suggest that Bart's Variety was been done in by lone Web operators like Nikki Finke. But Bart actually had more in common with Finke (who also doesn't seem to keep her ad hominem impulses from shaping her reporting) than you might think. ... [Via L.A. Observed] 11:38 P.M.

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Coming Soon: Another Castro Surprise?

Monday, April 6, 2009 

Are Cuba's Communist leaders eager to see the U.S. embargo end (as Marc Thiessen suggests) or terrified at the prospect (because it would unleash forces they can't control)? In 2003, Ann Louise Bardach noted that every time relations with Cuba seemed to be easing, Fidel Castro did something calculated to ratchet the tension back up: 

Consider what happened in 1996, after the Clinton administration and Cuba had settled on migration and drug interdiction accords.

Castro (after months of warnings) shot down two planes operated by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue, killing four people.

The upshot was the signing of the Helms-Burton Act, which significantly tightened the embargo and codified it into U.S. law.

Did Castro know this would be the result? Of course he did.

In 1980, president Jimmy Carter re-opened the U.S. Interests Sections in Havana as a de facto embassy. Castro responded by sending 125,000 refugees to Florida in the Mariel boatlift.

In the mid-1970s, in a remarkable and audacious act of diplomacy, then-state secretary Henry Kissinger and his assistant, William Rogers, conducted secret negotiations with the Cuban government on ending the embargo. Just as they believed they were closing in on a deal, Castro sent troops into Angola - scuttling the talks.

And gee, now that President Obama is preparing to lift family travel and remittance restrictions--and there's talk of lifting the entire travel ban--we hear about plans for Cuba to host Russian bombers, while Raul Castro conducts a dramatic, power-centralizing purge. But those surprises don't seem to have derailed the anti-embargo plans. If Bardach's theory holds, then, shouldn't we expect something even worse from Raul, and soon, no? .... 8:33 P.M.

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Huh? Ruben Navarette, explaining why "comprehensive immigration reform" failed, goes for the symmetrical condemnation prized by editorialists:

We learned that immigrant advocacy groups wanted an unconditional path to legalization for the undocumented, but that law and order conservatives would object to what they call amnesty. Although we need a new round of tougher and easier-to-enforce employer sanctions, it seems only right that they be accompanied by a tamper-proof identification card so employers know who is legally eligible to work. Conservatives fought the sanctions while liberals fought the ID card. In the end, we were back at square one. 

Conservatives fought the sanctions? Not the conservatives I'm aware of. Certainly not the "law and order" conservatives who opposed "what they call amnesty." ... 7:43 P.M.

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"Employee Free Choice On the Move" Part XVIII! Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln comes out against cloture for card check "in its current form." ... Again, it's not clear that "card check" has even 50 Senate votes at this point, let alone 60. ... 7:41 P.M.

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Tom Braden's Omituary ... Sniggergate ... Plus kf Goes Green!

Left out of the Tom Braden obits: Braden was a California newspaper editor when (according to Braden) future Senator Alan Cranston personally showed him compromising photos of an opponent. "I thought it was pretty shoddy business. It certainly changed my opinion of [Cranston]," Braden said (as first reported by Carl Cannon). Cranston denied the charge. I believe Braden. ... 1:25  A.M.

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First Thought Not Best Thought: "Sniggered"? You make the call! One virtue of bloggingheads is that you are often relaxed enough to think out loud. The problem is that you are often relaxed enough to think out loud. I apologize to Althouse. But I do think I would have said the same dumb thing about a man. ... 1:10 A.M.

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kf Goes Green: The Obama aide disclosure that shocked me wasn't Lawrence Summers making $5 million at a hedge fund, but Tom Donilon "earning $3.9 million as a partner at the Washington law firm O’Melveny & Myers."  ... Summers is a big-time economist, advising people with lots of money at stake on questions that involve, you know, equations. He had to "solve math puzzles" to get hired!  I'd expect him to be expensive. But Donilon's just a political Washington lawyer. He makes almost $4M? Wow. I didn't know I'd fallen so far behind. Somebody really ought to do something about the growing income inequality in our society. 12:07 A.M.

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Plan C: Time to Make Labor Play Defense?

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Selena Zito argues "[c]ard-check is dead"--at least for now--but points to the much-discussed "Plan B" compromise that would drop the two most significant parts of the "card check" bill (circumventing secret ballots, mandatory arbitration) and focus on

tougher penalties on businesses for unfair or punitive labor practices, a quicker way to enforce those, and equal access to all employees during non-working hours for campaigning purposes.

OK. But what's in it for the GOP and business?  Well, if the Democrats get more Senate seats in 2010 they might be able to pass the undiluted, original "card check" law. Zito says the anti-card check forces

may - and this is a big "may" - want to try to secure some reasonable compromise while they still have some leverage.

Jennifer Rubin notes the conspicuous fatal flaw in this line of analysis--as if labor is going to pass up the chance to enact full-strength card check in 2011 if they have the votes. There's nothing in a "Plan B" compromise for business. The problem is that there might be something in it for a couple of Republican Senators. Politicians don't like to leave any big interest group such as labor completely emptyhanded (and therefore angry). If 60 senators go for Plan B, it's on, whether business likes it or not.

What anti-card check lobby (including but not limited to business) badly needs now, you'd think, is an offensive weapon or two. What reforms might they want? Tougher investigtations of union corruption? Or a "level playing field" that would allow employers to contact workers outside of work (if unions are to get 'equal access" at work)? Or an "free employer speech" clause that would let managment frankly warn that if a given plant is unionized it might be shut down--as long as the warning is truthful? Or a provision that allows management to give raises--rebuild the middle class!--in the runup to a unionization vote? Business could present these changes--Plan C--in a calm, even-handed manner--e.g., "If there are bad actors that fire union organizers and stall elections, we're willing to increase penalties. At the same time, let's give employers the same rights as union organizers when it comes to making their case. And let's let workers extract higher wages without the bureaucracy and inflexible legalism of Detroit-style union rules--that's the best of both worlds. As for corrupt labor officials ..." The idea would be to avoid coming across as anti-union, while at the same time threatening to rob labor of all the net advantages a "Plan B" compromise might bring. That's leverage. .. 12:07 A.M.

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Today's Undernews Alerts

Friday, April 3, 2009 

Undernews Alert: Big-Story-If-True Division: 1) The NYT-ACORN  "game changer" story [Now on O'Reilly-ed And even Hot Air isn't quite convinced. Update: More here.]. ... I note that the reasons reporters give to sources for killing a story sometimes play to the sources' preexisting beliefs about press bias, and those reasons are sometimes not the real reasons the story was dropped. (It's easier to say "my editors are such Democrats" than "I'm not sure I believe you"). But would I be shocked if the Times chose not to pursue a story that might have damaged Obama? No. The allegation resonates with the Raines/Torricelli spike incident. ... 2) Are there "side letters" proving "that AIG never intended to pay out on any of its [credit default swap] contracts"? ... 2:34 P.M.

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When will elite right-wing opposition to the war in Afghanistan emerge in public? It's out there. ... Watch for the 'Bush avoided escalating this war because he knew it was a quagmire' meme. ... 2:33 P.M.

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'This Time It Was Supposed to Be Different'

Thursday, April 2, 2009 

Alert emailer J. makes a basic point about JournoList much more clearly than I did: 

 I also have a vague dislike for the practice you describe.   But my problem is that I also have a vague feeling that I can identify what about it really gets you down even though I don't think you have said this yourself ... [snip] ... Here goes:        

1.  A problem with the MSM is that they are innately compromised by being large organizations.  A stock character in literature is the newspaper reporter who can't print all that he knows because the publisher owes things to advertisers, it's bad politics, there's a risk of vehement complaints from the public, etc.  Moreover, we have all met reporters who fascinated us by saying things like, "Here's how it really is . . . ," and if you ask why they don't say that in print, they give a lot of answers that are not satisfying.  Now the excuse for this always was that a successful newspaper or radio or TV network of necessity had to be a large organization, simply to get heard.  A guy with a mimeograph machine in his bedroom can't do that, (except that I. F. Stone did it).  This led to a widespread feeling that what a consumer of news got was a sort of second-order reality, the filtered and compromised version.  The better the news organization, one hoped, the less the filtering or compromise, but there was no way to eliminate it. This was evil but a necessary evil.

 2.  That led to the feeling, too, that there was a first order of reality, which was what the reporters said among themselves.  But only the informed elite had access to that.        

3.  Where this is going is obvious.  With the Internet, we have thought, it is possible to get an audience without the gargantuan investment in printing presses, broadcast licenses or equipment, or the need to hire a large reporting staff so you can cover the broad range of topics necessary to sell a news product, attract advertisers, and so on.  You just need a computer and time.  This means no compromises in what is said, no filtering into a second order of reality, and direct address to the readership: exactly what you, the blogger, think is what I, the reader, get.  This is not to say you have all the advantages of a newspaper, because you don't.  But you can address the public without having the newspaper's disadvantages.         

4.  Against this background, JournoList is a very disappointing and sort of unsettling development.  Just the existence of the list and the fact that broadscale discussions go on inside it suggests that these liberal voices are deliberately and unnecessarily recreating one of the chief disadvantages of the MSM.  The suggestion that they have things to discuss privately about what they are doing (I assume they are using the list to discuss "journalism", not which movies to see, books to read, or recipes to cook), re-creates the idea that that, rather than what their consumers see, is the first order of reality. This seems to break one of the promises of, or hopes for, the Internet.  It also suggests that these journalists rather liked the cage that their MSM ilk used to be in, because these present day guys are recreating that for themselves.  That's a very disappointing discovery also because it diminishes them as people.         

5.  Robert Wright was correct to say that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, but the response to that is that this time it was supposed to be different -- and that, indeed, Bloggingheads is supposed to be as close as you can get to being admitted into Frankfurter's[**] living room . ...  There is also nothing whatever wrong with meeting in secret in some instances -- it is highly unlikely that we would have a Constitution resembling the masterwork we have if the boys had had to meet in public, and there are plenty of other examples.  But because the whole point of journalism is to inform people, the suggestion that its substance ought to be dealt with in sessions that exclude those to be informed is by its nature troubling. 

**--I had compared JournoList to the young Felix Frankfurter's "House of Truth"--a good career move for Frankfurter.

Last word on JList? Chris Lehmann ... 12:40 A.M.

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I'm late ...

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 

Making this obvious joke (about how to balance the budget) ...In the future, everyone will be secretary of Health and Human Services for 15 minutes. ... 6:15 P.M..

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Pointing out that Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano has made the sort of mindless PC-trumps-common sense statement that gives Democrats a bad name--calling for "parity" in security on the Mexican and Canadian borders:  

 "We shouldn't go light on one and heavy on the other," she said of the Canadian and Mexican borders.

"This is one NAFTA, one area, one continent, and there should be parity there."

That's because of the vicious Canadian drug gangs now threatening to take over Vancouver. ... Or is it bootleg CuddleCore CDs? ... Update: An alert reader emails to note that drug-gang violence is erupting in Vancouver, although on nothing like Mexico's scale. ... 6:08 P.M.

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Tedisco--the Republican--will win that New York special election on the absentee vote, no? Nate Silver is ducking .... Maybe there'll be a write-in surge for Taraji P. Henson! Ha ha ha ha. ...6:02 P.M.

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My What Big Tongs You Have

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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Unions Are Easy!

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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The Best of Journolistism

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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Wagoner: Obama's Diem?

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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