Stephen Colbert leaves Mary Matalin speechless by simply telling her he’s going to keep score of every GOP talking point she uses:
She literally can’t cope. It’s a bit strange, is it not, when the most incisive interviewers on television are alleged comedians?
The New York Times, a helpful instrument in the right’s war on Acorn, which, along with the spinelessness of Congressional Democrats has now driven the group to bankruptcy, does not even have the grace to change its reporting in the face of the overwhelming evidence:
This week, the Maryland chapter announced that it would not reopen its offices, which were shuttered in September in the wake of a widely publicized series of video recordings made by two conservative activists, posing as a prostitute and a pimp, who secretly filmed Acorn workers providing them tax advice. In the videos, Acorn workers told one of the activists, James E. O’Keefe III, how to hide prostitution activities from the authorities and avoid taxes, raising no objections to his proposed criminal activities.
The article mentions the fact that the group was cleared of wrongdoing, but never mentions the fact that O’Keefe did not pose as a pimp, he just pretended to pose as a pimp on Fox TV shows. Nor, for that matter, did the Acorn people advise them on how to avoid taxes. But why bother to change a good story just because it’s not true?
Today is the 32nd anniversary of my marriage to one of the most saint like persons on earth. She has had to be, to put up with me. So, this song’s for her.
Hard to believe Elton John was ever so young.
Perhaps our first mistake was believing that a regulator who did not believe in regulation was an indispensable man.
Alan Greenspan has now decided that maybe, after all, the government has a role in regulating the economic system. I’m no economist, but I do have a degree in history from a relatively elite college, so maybe that’s the reason why I, along with most sentient beings, was perfectly aware that we had, many times in the past, already learned what Greenspan had just discovered. It seems to me that it takes an effort of will akin to religious conviction to believe that unregulated markets will always and everywhere self regulate and bring about the best of all possible worlds. The Ayn Rand types like Greenspan go even farther, and if they had their way the government would not protect us from any of the John Galts out there. Just wondering, but would the air in LA be breathable today if we’d listened to the Sultana of Selfishness?
But to get back to Greenspan, while he may concede that he refuses to believe that our present situation could have been avoided, or that we can avoid more such crises in the future, not, that is, unless we veer from poorly regulated markets to central planning:
The former Fed chairman also acknowledged that the central bank failed to grasp the magnitude of the housing bubble but argued, as he has before, that its policy of low interest rates was not to blame. He stood by his conviction that little could be done to identify a bubble before it burst, much less to pop it.
“We had been lulled into a sense of complacency by the only modestly negative economic aftermaths of the stock market crash of 1987 and the dot-com boom,” Mr. Greenspan wrote. “Given history, we believed that any declines in home prices would be gradual. Destabilizing debt problems were not perceived to arise under those conditions.”
…
“Unless there is a societal choice to abandon dynamic markets and leverage for some form of central planning, I fear that preventing bubbles will in the end turn out to be infeasible,” Mr. Greenspan wrote. “Assuaging their aftermath seems the best we can hope for.”
I haven’t read Dean Baker’s reaction to this because I want to see if I can anticipate it.
First, the housing bubble was identified. Baker identified it, as did Krugman, and no doubt a host of others. As Bake has pointed out in the past, housing prices were rising at rates out of proportion to historical trends, and rents were not rising in tandem with housing prices, both signs that there was something wrong with the housing market. Even I knew something was wrong. Housing is a basic necessity, and it stands to reason that the cost of a necessity cannot increase by 15 to 20% a year while real income remains flat. Something has to give, and it’s not like anyone expects income to rise.
Of course if you can’t identify a bubble, you won’t try to pop it, or to let the air out gradually. Greenspan refused to do both. It should not have been difficult for the Fed to put a stop to subprime lending.
Let us not forget that this entire crisis, including the housing bubble, might never have happened had we not repealed Glass Steagal, and allowed the thieves free access to our money. That was done at the urging of Greenspan and others, who felt it was critical that bankers be allowed unfettered access to our money.
It also doesn’t help that Greenspan took a hands off approach to deriviatives and urged Congress to do so as well, and of course Congress always followed the advice of this Delphic font of wisdom.
Finally, Greenspan’s either/or prescription for the future is nonsense. We don’t have a choice between Randism and communism. We had no out of control bubbles in this country while the reforms put in place during the Depression remained in force. It was only when Greenspan and his ilk came to power, and removed those barriers to plunder that they returned. We now, unfortunately, have a Congress too beholden to the bankers to even consider re-erecting a meaningful regulatory structure, not to mention simply outlawing financial instruments that serve no useful function.
There’s only one thing we should do to a proven failure like Greenspan. We must create a government post even more powerful that that of the head of the Federal Reserve, and we must give it to him. Failure is rewarded in Washington, and failure on that scale deserves extra special treatment.
If Nancy Pelosi were a man, she would be hailed as one of the most effective Speakers ever. When the Health Care bill passes, it will be because of her leadership. It’s not easy to get 200 and some odd cowards to stand up to the big bad Republicans, but she’s going to get it done. If Harry Reid was half the leader Pelosi is, we’d have the public option and we’d have Republicans on the run.
I just spent about an hour writing a post which started out as a brilliant idea, but slowly ripened, or should I say decayed, into a piece of crap. Into the draft heap it went, probably never to be resurrected.
Political punditry is just no fun these days.
I am hoping that the eventual passage of the health care bill will breathe new life into these pages. It’s been an unnecessarily long, and excessively strange trip. Who knew that an electorate that was unfazed by a president that wanted to spy on its every movement and assert an almost unlimited presidential power would suddenly smell fascism (or is it socialism, it’s so confusing) when the government tried to regulate health insurance companies? The one glimmer of hope is the fact that the new Know-Nothings appear to be losing steam, probably because they have been missing too much nap time.
So, maybe next week, or the week after, we will have other things to obsess about, fresh grist for the punditry mill. I can’t wait.
Here’s a type of change I could have believed in: appointing people to federal offices with a proven history of knowing something about the field in which they are chosen to operate. No more Brownies, no more Bernie Keriks. Wouldn’t it be nice. But, at least when it comes to financial regulation, such an outcome is nothing but a dream.
Dean Baker, an economist who saw the bubble for what it was, points out that none of Obama’s choices for positions at the Fed saw the bubble coming”
The Obama administration announced its three picks for the vacant positions at the Fed last week. Not surprisingly, no one on the list was among those who had warned of the housing bubble. This is not surprising because there is virtually no overlap between the list of people who had warned of the bubble and the list of people who are politically acceptable as appointees to the Fed.
It is actually rather quaint that Baker would even suggest that competent people should work at the Fed. Why should the Fed be any different. Can you think of a single person who has consistently been right about their field of expertise who has managed to get and stay on the top? There must be some out there, but they are few and far between.
Baker is a realist. He isn’t asking that competent people be appointed, he is only asking that the incompetents be required to acknowledge the reality that they actively denied in the past:
Specifically, the Senate should insist that the nominees give their account of the run-up to the crisis and explain where the Fed make mistakes and what they would do differently with the benefit of hindsight. This line of questioning is especially important in the case of Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee as vice-chair of the Board of the Governors.
Yellen’s fingerprints are already on this crisis, having served as a Fed governor in the 90s and more recently as a president of the San Francisco Federal Bank. Dr. Yellen is on record as explicitly saying that the Fed lacks the ability to recognize asset bubbles like the housing bubble. She argued further that it lacks the tools to effectively rein in an asset bubble. And, she argued that cleaning up after the collapse of the bubble is no big deal. In terms of economic analysis, she hit a grand slam in getting it absolutely as wrong as possible.
Presumably, Yellen has changed her views of what the Fed can and should do about asset bubbles. The banking committee should give Ms. Yellen the opportunity to go on record explaining her new position and how the events of the last three years have led her to change her mind on these issues. Of course, if she still adheres to her earlier position, then she clearly is not an appropriate person to be vice-chair of the Fed.
Of course it’s always possible that Yellen has gotten religion, but for every zealous convert there are nine apostates in waiting.
People like Karl Rove must feel like they have been given a gift from heaven. The Democrats could have used the issue of the economy and Wall Street to beat Republicans over the head. Instead, they have opted for both bad policy and bad politics. Only the Democrats could ram defeat down the jaws of victory.
It is a sad fact that those things to which we pay the most attention often have the least significance. A case in point is Eric Massa, who will not even rate a footnote in history. At the same time, truly significant developments often go unnoticed. It’s only years later that we realize something has changed, brought about by something that went virtually unnoticed at the time.
This is a case in point, reported by the American Prospect. Back in 2003 Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani immigrant, was jailed in New York and tortured, before being deported. There is no evidence that he had ever done anything wrong.
The following year, he filed a lawsuit against dozens of U.S. officials, claiming he was declared a “high interest” detainee and placed in ADMAX because of his race, religion, and national origin. Iqbal’s lawyers sought to question former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller under oath about their responsibility for the jailing and abuse of detainees in the Brooklyn detention center. But by a 5-4 vote last May, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rejected the request, quashing a lawsuit that had spent five years climbing through the lower courts. The justices ruled that Iqbal’s lawyers had not made a plausible case that Ashcroft or Mueller was responsible for Iqbal’s mistreatment and barred the lawyers from asking the government to turn over evidence to which only it had access. In doing so, the court used Ashcroft v. Iqbal to rewrite more than a half-century of precedent establishing the hurdles plaintiffs must cross before they can begin discovery — the pre-trial process that requires defendants to hand over internal documents, answer questions under oath, and provide other evidence.
The opinion was so broad that it has become a formidable weapon for corporations and other defendants trying to shield themselves against everything from employment discrimination to product-liability lawsuits. Since the ruling, dozens of cases that might have once proceeded have been thrown out because they don’t meet the Iqbal test.
When John Roberts, and Alito were nominated, attention was focused on their views on so-called social issues, such as abortion, but perceptive observers knew that their real agenda was corporatist. They haven’t touched the abortion decision, and probably don’t care if they do, but they have done yeoman’s work for the corporations to whom they have always given their primary allegiance.
The fact is that it is often the case that we know beyond a moral doubt that something is happening when we lack the legal evidence to prove it. Employment discrimination cases are a great example. If white folks, or men, seem to be getting all the promotions, you might know deep in your gut that something is wrong, but you have to prove it with raw data, and that’s where the discovery process comes in. If you have to prove your case before you start discovery, then many cases will never be commenced. Heretofore, you could commence discovery as long as you alleged facts that stated a cause of action (which the Prospect calls the pleading standard, a term I’ve never heard, though it’s accurate enough); now you have to produce hard evidence in support of the common sense inferences that flow from known facts. It’s those inferences you need discovery to prove, but now you don’t get discovery unless you can prove it to begin with. If, for instance, the New York Times, citing unnamed sources, disclosed that a certain corporation was poisoning your water, you might not be able to sue unless you could name those sources. The Prospect cites just such a case.
The Prospect notes:
Indeed, legal scholars will long debate whether the Roberts court seized on the Iqbal case to change the pleading standard or whether it changed the pleading standard incidentally, in its eagerness to throw out the Iqbal case and protect senior national-security officials from questioning.
I don’t think there’s much debate here. It was a perfect opportunity to make such a ruling, because its real impact would get lost in the smoke that alway surrounds the word “terrorism”. Congress is already bought and paid for, with even worse to come as we enter the era of corporate sponsorship of politicians. Now the courts are being slowly closed to the average citizen, not by direct legislation, but by arcane interpretations of the legal ground rules by which we adjudicate legal disputes.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration, eschewing the idea that it might be able to do two things at once, has done almost nothing to get its judicial nominees approved, practically guaranteeing right wing judicial dominance into the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I was unable to candidate’s forum yesterday at the LaGrua Center in Stonington. Just about every candidate for statewide office was there, as was Blumenthal and Joe Courtney. I wasn’t there, but a reporter for the Day was, one Patricia Daddona, whose article was part snark, and part flaccid stenography.
Now, I’ve got nothing against snark, but I think if one is going to feature it in one’s writing, one might want to actually know something about the subject at hand. Like most of the other reporters for the Day (Ted Mann being a glaring exception) Ms. Daddona does not appear to have taken the time to familiarize herself with either the basic facts on the ground and/or the nature of our system of government, something with which her editors appear to have no problem. To wit:
Inside, jokes about the weather and the Republicans, not necessarily in that order; a few battle cries sounded with all the furious bravado of a party distanced from the seat of power; and after the speeches, animated mingling of Democratic political candidates, party delegates and a handful of voters. (Emphasis added)
Let’s take stock here.
The Democrats, with particular focus on Connecticut:
Now, I will freely admit that the Democrats sometimes act like they have no power, and that when they get power they sometimes seem to be obsessed with figuring out how to throw it away. (See, that’s informed snark) But the only way that one can justify saying that the Democrats of today are “distanced from the seat of power” is by defining the seat of power as consisting solely of the governorship of the State of Connecticut, which, by the way, if they don’t blow it (a huge “if”), the Democrats are poised to take in the fall. By that definition, this being a two party system, we must conclude that the Republicans in this State, who are totally powerless creatures in the state legislature and have no representation in Congress, somehow occupy the seat of power in this fair state. Daddona’s statement also betrays a rather curious understanding of our political system, where on the state level, at least, the executive is hardly all powerful. There truly is a separation of powers, and most of that power is in the hands of Democrats. This is rather basic civics, or it was in the olden days, when I received my schooling.
It is a curious thing that this sort of dismissive attitude is most often directed at Democrats, whether they are in or out of office, while the right, whether in or out, is treated with fawning respect. This morning, as I had an otherwise wonderful breakfast at the Porthole Cafe in Portland, I was treated to the spectacle of Karl Rove, David Brooks and Tom Friedman (happily I was easily able to divert my gaze) being featured for the millionth time each on Meet the Press. (Friedman is probably perceived in the Beltway as a liberal, but to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I know a lot of liberals, most of my friends are liberals, and Friedman is no liberal). If one were to judge strictly by the Sunday shows, one would have to conclude that the Republicans are in power in Washington. Daddonna appears to have absorbed that impression. She certainly hasn’t bothered to read her own paper, within whose pages, if she paid attention, she might find actual facts to disabuse herself of her skewed understanding of Connecticut political reality.
Brad Delong often ends his posts with the following refrain: “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps?” He is always referring to our national press corps, but the same applies on the local level throughout our great land.
We played hooky from politics today, missing the candidate meet and greet in Stonington to get together with some friends in Portland, Maine. As I write this I am in a hotel room in Portland, quite glad that I missed the rain down in Connecticut. This is a great town, by the way, superior to anything Connecticut has to offer in the way of city life, something that we Nutmeggers should be seeking to rectify.
The excuse for the get together was the Portland Flower show. Some pictures below. By the way, I want to pay tribute to my little Panasonic DMC-LX3. Most of these pictures were taken in low or bizarre light, without flash. The anti-shake mechanism really works. Given the long exposure times, these pictures are really sharp.
