Month: April 2013

Oh, I guess it’s time to start mawkishly proclaiming a “new normal”

by digby

This Ron Fournier piece is entitled “Why Boston Bombings Might Be Scarier Than 9/11”. Seriously:

From the nation’s founding, America has had two sharply delineated lives: one public and one private. The latter is meant to be safe and sacrosanct, part of what Thomas Jefferson called “the pursuit of Happiness.” The public life is rowdy and partisan, even violent as reflected in the Civil War. “What happened in Boston,” said Meg Mott, professor of politics at Marlboro College in Vermont, “is that the private life got blown up and hit deep in the heart of our bifurcated American lives. The lines were blurred, and that’s scary.”

They targeted life. They targeted liberty. Now somebody has attacked pursuit of happiness.

In those ugly months after 9/11, we feared there would be a “new normal” for America – that no place and nobody would feel safe again, that our churches, schools, malls as well as arenas and other places of great gathering would be killing fields. Those fears were not realized, not right away. Does the nightmare begin with Boston?

Today, officials identified the 8-year-old boy killed at the finish line. His name was Martin Richard. He left a world unworthy of him.

But the world is full of such horrors in this unworthy world, isn’t it? Indeed, America’s last horrifying act of violence was one in which over 20 little children like Martin Richard were gunned down, on purpose, in their first grade classrooms. Did we fall apart and declare that our “pursuit of happiness” is under siege and that this was an “attack on liberty?” Why not? What’s the difference?

The difference is that we didn’t call it “terrorism” isn’t it, which apparently would have made it necessary to turn ourselves into hysterical basket cases mewling about Thomas Jefferson’s dreams being destroyed because some “coward”  targeted “life and liberty” and which is just well … stupid and obvious. In fact, we have no idea why this madman targeted anyone. At this point, for all we know, he could have had a grudge against the City of Boston or hated marathon runners.

This is the lugubrious and mawkish commentary that gives opportunistic politicians permission to behave as if we’ve been attacked by martians instead of human beings and throw reason out the window. It’s counter-productive to our ability to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to say the least.

These pants-wetters would do well to follow the edict of their hero Winston Churchill:

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Torture

by tristero

I’m sorry, but I disagree with the basic assumption behind this report.

I know their intentions are good, namely to stop the US from torturing people. But it doesn’t matter whether torture works, that’s irrelevant. Torture is morally wrong. Always? Yes, always. It really is that simple.

Chris Hayes passes an important test

by digby

I always watch a lot of cable news (or have it on in the background) but when a major story hits, I watch it more intently and tend to move around between the stations all day to see how they are covering it.  Yesterday, everyone was on pretty good behavior even Fox which one could tell was having to bite its collective tongue not to use the occasion to criticize the president and push the Islamic terrorist scenario. Considering how tough that obviously was for them, they did an admirable job.

But still, the reporting by the usual suspects was painfully predictable and usually unenlightening. CNN was particularly excitable, particularly in rushing to “question” the president’s unwillingness to use the word terrorism before he knew the facts. Dumb journalism.

Mostly what I hate about this coverage is the maudlin and somewhat unctuous posing (at least it feels like posing) among the pundits and anchors. It makes me yearn for the days of Walter Cronkite. (I know, that makes me old — so shoot me.)

There were exceptions. I thought Scott Pelley on CBS was remarkably professional in reporting the minute to minute during the day yesterday. And among the evening anchors, I though Chris Hayes hit just the right notes. As an analyst as well as a reporter he asked probing questions with an appropriately serious mien, but he didn’t seem to be giving a performance like so many of the rest of them did.

And he brought on people who had something to say and said it ways that offered a new perspective. Like this interesting interview with a great wordsmith like Charlie Pierce:

We thinks of these anchors as political analysts, which on most days they are. But they also serve as our touchstones in times of crisis and those who offer both information and perspective are the ones we tend to trust. I was glad to see Hayes passed that test last night. I’ll feel confident going forward that I can turn to him at these sadly inevitable moments and he’ll help instead of hinder.

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The Excel error that ruined the world

by digby

I have to admit I never expected that among the reasons the elites have been pursuing a daft economic policy over the past few years was a simple calculation error. Here’s Dean Baker:

How Much Unemployment Was Caused by Reinhart and Rogoff’s Arithmetic Mistake?

That’s the question millions will be asking when they see the new paper by my friends at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. Herndon, Ash, and Pollin (HAP) corrected the spreadsheets of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They show the correct numbers tell a very different story about the relationship between debt and GDP growth than the one that Reinhart and Rogoff have been hawking.

Just to remind folks, Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) are the authors of the widely acclaimed book on the history of financial crises, This Time is Different. They have also done several papers derived from this research, the main conclusion of which is that high ratios of debt to GDP lead to a long periods of slow growth. Their story line is that 90 percent is a cutoff line, with countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above this level seeing markedly slower growth than countries that have debt-to-GDP ratios below this level. The moral is to make sure the debt-to-GDP ratio does not get above 90 percent.

There are all sorts of good reasons for questioning this logic. 

[…]

But HAP tells us that we need not concern ourselves with any arguments this complicated. The basic R&R story was simply the result of them getting their own numbers wrong.

After being unable to reproduce R&R’s results with publicly available data, HAP were able to get the spreadsheets that R&R had used for their calculations. It turns out that the initial results were driven by simple computational and transcription errors. The most important of these errors was excluding four years of growth data from New Zealand in which it was above the 90 percent debt-to-GDP threshold. When these four years are added in, the average growth rate in New Zealand for its high debt years was 2.6 percent, compared to the -7.6 percent that R&R had entered in their calculation.

Since R&R country weight their data (each country’s growth rate has the same weight), and there are only seven countries that cross into the high debt region, correcting this one mistake alone adds 1.5 percentage points to the average growth rate for the high debt countries. This eliminates most of the falloff in growth that R&R find from high debt levels. (HAP find several other important errors in the R&R paper, however the missing New Zealand years are the biggest part of the story.)

This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment. In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R’s work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R’s work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.
[…]
If facts mattered in economic policy debates, this should be the cause for a major reassessment of the deficit reduction policies being pursued in the United States and elsewhere. It should also cause reporters to be a bit slower to accept such sweeping claims at face value.

This doesn’t excuse the politicians around the world completely ignoring all the real world evidence showing that their policies are making things worse everywhere. This study just very conveniently gave them all reason to pursue the policies they already wanted to pursue. But the model on which they depended to sell their preferred policies has been discredited and now it’s up to them to explain why they are still intent upon pursuing them.

We can start with the United States congress, particularly Paul Ryan, and the White House.

Update: Mike Konzcal has much more, but this really takes the cake:

Coding Error.

As Herndon-Ash-Pollin puts it: “A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49…This spreadsheet error…is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR’s published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category.” Belgium, in particular, has 26 years with debt-to-GDP above 90 percent, with an average growth rate of 2.6 percent (though this is only counted as one total point due to the weighting above).

Being a bit of a doubting Thomas on this coding error, I wouldn’t believe unless I touched the digital Excel wound myself. One of the authors was able to show me that, and here it is. You can see the Excel blue-box for formulas missing some data.

This error is needed to get the results they published, and it would go a long way to explaining why it has been impossible for others to replicate these results. If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.

I wouldn’t let the politicians off so easy — they were looking for this “evidence” and were lucky that it was provided for them. It’s not as if they haven’t had ample other evidence proving their policies are counter-productive. They chose what to believe.

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Some progress: we haven’t completely lost our heads

This piece by Heather Hurlburt spoke to me:

Dear America:

Forgive the metaphor, but the process of sorting out, living through, mourning and exacting justice for a terror attack is more than a little bit like … a marathon. You came through Monday with flying colors, in a new personal best. But remember, this was only mile one.

Let’s review. We don’t know who planted those explosive devices, but, as former West Point academic Brian Fishman reminds us, we know what those who resort to terror’s indiscriminate violence want:

Terrorists kill for two basic reasons: They want to disrupt and destroy institutions or symbols of a political order they despise and they want to intimidate people not touched by the attack directly. For years, bombs have been the most useful tool to achieve both goals: They were the best way to kill a large number of people and get a lot of media attention.

So how did our symbols fare today? Boston Marathon – finished, with runners knocked over, getting up to complete the course, and pledging they’d be back. First responders – government’s first representatives at any crisis – ran like heroes into the smoke, and received kudos, on tax day no less, for their work on our behalf.

And as for our national institutions, the unity and determination emanating from President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner almost made one nostalgic. It is true that sales of “Boston Sucks” baseball shirts are taking a hit, but the economy overall is not.Our hearts go out to every person injured or killed, every family that has suffered a loss. And yet the bombs killed fewer people than guns, automobiles or saturated fats in America today. Terrorists in Iraq killed 10 times as many people today as the Boston murderer(s) managed to do.

My fellow Americans, our hearts are broken, but the state of our union is strong. Maybe stronger than it was yesterday, before we saw those pictures of our fellow-citizens running from the race to the fallen.

So what about sowing fear and division among the rest of us, terrorists’ other goal?

Americans of every political stripe have been calling out speculation and scapegoating as fast as it happens. Bostonians of every faith and race have come together to mourn their losses and celebrate their heroes. Maybe the attacker or attackers, whomever they are, didn’t know Boston’s difficult history of race and religious relations, maybe they did – but for those of us who do, this unity is especially beautiful to see.

That’s pretty good for mile one. But we have so many hard miles ahead. Not turning on each other, or our institutions, or our own freedoms, whatever the truth behind these terrible attacks proves to be… can we keep it up?

I hope so.

I think the most frightening thing, for me, about 9/11 wasn’t only the horror of the attacks. My greatest fear came from the reaction (overreaction, actually) in which it wasn’t just average Americans who lost their bearings, but our leadership as well. The president, who clearly was out of his depth despite the media’s determination to present him as a Churchillian figure in the later months, the nefarious power grab of his Vice President, the elite columnists immediately calling for mass incarceration and torture, all of it. As bad as the attacks were, it was the evidence that our leaders panicked and treated the terrorists as an existential threat on the level of an invasion by aliens from another planet that knocked me for a loop. (Also too, the rank opportunism.)

Based on that experience, I’ve always assumed that we were doomed when terrorists, whether of the foreign or domentic variety, inevitably tried their deadly tactic again. But I’m feeling more hopeful today. It seems we haven’t completely lost our minds. At least not yet.

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I stand with Howard Dean in his disgust

by David Atkins

Howard Dean is my hero. No politician is perfect, and I don’t agree with him on everything. But Howard Dean is why I got involved in progressive politics as an activist. Howard Dean’s insurgent campaign led me to believe that there was a reason to think that the Democratic Party could be more than the shadow of itself it had been since the 1970s. And it was DNC Chairman Howard Dean’s call to progressives to get involved in local central committees that led me on the path to being a county party chair and state executive board member in California.

Howard Dean has just about had enough.

WASHINGTON — Howard Dean has had it with President Obama’s budget proposal, saying the plan put forward by the White House might just drive him from the Democratic Party he once led as DNC chair.

On Sunday night, Dean tweeted that the restoration of some defense sequestration cuts contained in Obama’s budget proposal were a step too far when coupled with the president’s entitlement cut proposal that progressives like Dean are already livid about.

“If this is true I may have to become an independant [sic],” Dean wrote, before linking to an April 10 article by Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Josh Green.

Dean doubled down on his threat to leave the part in an interview with BuzzFeed Monday. The White House did not respond directly, but an official did push back Monday on the thrust of Dean’s attacks.

“I just think that’s unacceptable,” Dean said. “If this passed I would have to reevaluate if I belong in the Democratic Party. If this were passed with Democratic votes, I think it would be impossible to be Democrat.”

“I would have to oppose any Democrat that is supportive of this,” Dean added.

I don’t disagree. The direction of the national Democratic Party is totally unacceptable under current leadership. The reason I stay involved is that California Democrats are a mostly bright spot. At our convention this weekend, we passed a number of progressive resolutions, including one written by CDP Chairman John Burton unequivocally rejecting Social Security cuts.

How the folks in D.C. can countenance what has happened to the national Party is anyone’s guess. But I stand with Howard Dean in his disgust.

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“We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil”

by digby

Patton Oswalt wrote this:

Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

That is all.

The secondary devices

by digby

Charles Pierce on the scene:

The first time I heard them was at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Commonwealth Avenue where a police officer told me, “Across the street we have a secondary device on a bench down the block.” The second time I heard them was four blocks East — closer to the bloodied finish line of this year’s Boston Marathon, which is not going to be remembered like any other Boston Marathon, or any other footrace in the history of the world — another police officer told me, “Across the street we have a secondary device on the island in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue.” I crossed the street and walked east across an alley between the buildings. The third and last time I heard it was at the corner of Clarendon Street and Commonwealth Avenue. I had walked down an unguarded block and had come out one block below where the afternoon’s bloodshed had taken place. A policeman told me, “We have the possibility of another device. You are not safe here. Please move along for your own safety.” She did not appear to be kidding. You could smell the blood a block and a half away. On a day like this, everybody’s nervous. Everybody’s scared. Nobody knows anything. And everything is a secondary device.

Read on … He says you can smell the blood two blocks away.

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The fog of idiocy


by digby

Fergawdsakes:

Yeah, and he didn’t read “My Pet Goat” either.  Even Brit Hume says there will be plenty of time to determine whether it’s a terrorist attack, but CNN seems to think this is somehow like Benghazi. Except  for the fact that it took place in one of America’s major cities with every police and investigatory agency along with the whole world’s media being right there I suppose they have a point.

Meanwhile, a “Saudi national” is being reported by CBS to have been tackled by a bystander for suspiciously running away from the explosion.

Meanwhile, here’s how the British are treating the bombing:

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Why we pay taxes

by David Atkins

A lot of brave people ran straight into the Boston Marathon explosion site as soon as it happened, even as no one knew if other bombs were set to go off (it tends to be a particularly cruel terrorist tactic to delay other explosions to take out first responders on scene.)

Almost all of them were taxpayer-funded public employees.

Those people are heroes. The people who vilify them as “moochers” and “thugs” should be shunned in polite society.

If my taxes are going to pay these people’s salaries and others like them, that’s more than worth it. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise without giving them a sharp piece of your mind.

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