Matt Yglesias

Learning The Rules

Chris Sheridan notes that LeBron James opened Team USA’s exhibition game against Turkey with a FIBA move, swatting a ball that had hit the rim and was likely to bound into the hoop away from the basket. That’s goaltending in America, but legitimate defense under FIBA rules.

That seems like an important step to me. Over the past few years, I’ve consistently thought that the fact that the rules have been an underplayed problem for American teams in international competitions — it’s hard when our guys are playing under unfamiliar rules that their opponents are familiar with. But it seems that this year the players and the coaching staff are putting more emphasis on getting people to think about how the FIBA ruleset should effect their behavior.

Celebrity Skin

I see I’m not the only one who thought John McCain’s “Celebrity” ad would be a good opportunity for a Hole reference, as Michael Crowley goes there too opining:

P.S. Terrible video but this album actually had its moments.

I agree that Hole gets a bad rap, but really Live Through This has the vast majority of the listenable material. Did you know that Melissa auf der Mar has a blog?

Absolute Privilege

The Bush administration wants to say that its officials have carte blanche to ignore congressional subpoenas, to which Judge John Bates replies:

The executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law.

Mark Kleiman observes that this is the legal equivalent of being told your argument is bullshit. For real analysis read Marty Lederman.

Defining Candor Down

With some press outlets now pointing out that John McCain’s dishonest ads are dishonest, I got a few commenters wondering if I’ll stop complaining about McCain’s cozy relationship with the press. I think I’ll do that when reporters stop crediting him with “irrepressible candor” for the most banal Q&A interactions imaginable. The press is still treating him the way proud parents treat their kid, perhaps willing to discipline him gently when he gets out of line but still eager to swear that his every ordinary action is magic.

Out of Touch

Pivoting off the news about John McCain’s $520 shoes, Chris Hayes wonders if the press will ever notice that John McCain is a rich, out of touch elitist. Well, I have my doubts. But this stuff is relevant. Clearly, it’s possible for people who’ve lived lives of privilege (FDR is the famous example) to promote policies that are beneficial to people who are struggling. But you really do see with McCain a lot of proposals that seem to reflect a lack of understanding of how people live their lives.

It’s easy, for example, for someone on the “I married an heiress” plan to talk about the need to privatize Social Security or cut benefits. And someone who, like John McCain, has never actually experienced private sector health insurance might well not understand what it is about it that has so many people agitated. And McCain, it’s worth recalling, isn’t even someone who got rich by earning a fortune in business and thus might have learned something about upward mobility. He just married into it. But he doesn’t appear to have any of that FDR-like sense of noblesse oblige — he just has a lot of policies that are well-suited to the interests of people like himself.

The Good Guys

The Hill takes a look at what smart growth and transit advocates are doing to try to take advantage of high gas prices to convince people that a shift of federal policy away from encouraging auto-dependency is the right way to go. Apparently folks have “coalesced around a bill introduced by Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) called the Transportation and Housing Choices for Gas Price Relief Act of 2008.” In preparation for shifting to 501 (c) 4 status, I won’t by any means endorse the bill or urge congress to pass it. Instead, I’ll merely note that various people I respect seem to be hoping that congress passes this bill.

More info More »« Less at Streetsblog.

UPDATE: Also — if you live in DC and want to do something good for smart growth, the environment, public health, and the local economy you should come to the Zoning Commission meeting on parking minimum’s today at 6:30 PM (441 4th Street NW) and join me in advocating that minimums be lowered or abolished.

Efficiency

Energy efficiency is probably the cheapest, easiest renewable resource we have available to us. For a long time, energy was cheap and national policy was to make it as cheap as possible. That’s left us with a legacy of infrastructure and appliances built on the assumption that wasteful use of energy is no big deal. But it is a bit deal and we have a lot of the needed technology and know-how needed to deal with it. Which I assume is what Barack Obama was getting at when he said this at an energy town hall meeting today:

Finally, one of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways to conserve energy and use less oil is to make America more energy efficient and more competitive with the world. That’s why, when I’m President, I will call on business, government, and the American people to make America 50 percent more energy efficient by 2030.

But what does it mean to become “50 percent more energy efficient”? Does that mean we’ll use half as much energy? That our GDP’s energy intensity will be cut in half? Or that there’s some measure of “energy efficiency” such that 2030 energy efficiency will be fifty percent larger than in 2008? Unfortunately, efficiency is a difficult subject to talk about. An SUV could have an engine that’s “more efficient” than the engine on a moped (i.e., it does a better job of converting a given quantity of gasoline into horsepower) while still getting many fewer miles per gallon. I was in an elevator earlier today where the lights were freakishly dim, and a woman in there with me speculated that it might be for energy efficiency purposes, but dimming the lights isn’t really the same as making them more efficient.

Photo by Flickr user thingermajig used under a Creative Commons license

Celebrity Skin

Pardon me if you’ve seen this point elsewhere, but in what sense is John McCain not a celebrity? I’ve seen him on the covers of magazines, on television, in newspapers, doing guest appearances on SNL, etc.:

Could you possibly be a major party presidential nominee and not be a celebrity? But in particular, McCain actually stands out among politicians as being someone who was a famous celebrity first and then parlayed his fame into a political career, rather than merely being someone who’s well-known for being an important politician.

Management By McCain

Kevin Drum’s not the only liberal upset by a political press that can’t seem to hold John McCain responsible for John McCain’s campaign tactics. But isn’t the image painted in today’s stories — of McCain as a kind of passive bystander to decisions being made on his behalf by his staff — sort of more damning?

The presidency, after all, involves significant managerial challenges. And neither McCain nor Barack Obama has ever been a mayor or a governor or run an executive agency. Neither has ever run a company. McCain was a Navy officer, but he didn’t achieve the kind of rank where he had substantial managerial responsibilities — he flew airplanes, he didn’t command ships. For both of them, their presidential campaigns are the largest enterprises they’ve ever run. That’s not good preparation for the White House in either case, but we don’t have much else to go on. And if we’re supposed to believe that McCain can’t seize control of his own campaign strategy, then what does that say about his executive leadership?

What Was Wrong With HMOs?

Say the word “HMO” and most Americans start reaching for their revolver. But most people who look at health policy and health economics agree that the HMOs were actually on to something, and that there really needs to be more scrutiny of which procedures are actually helpful and more emphasis on prevention rather than costly treatment. One question is why didn’t this work out better? Paul Krugman’s theory:

[I]f costs are to be controlled, someone has to act as a referee on doctors’ medical decisions. During the 1990’s it seemed, briefly, as if private H.M.O.’s could play that role. But then there was a public backlash. It turns out that even in America, with its faith in the free market, people don’t trust for-profit corporations to make decisions about their health.

Tyler Cowen’s response:

In my view what people objected to was not the for-profit status of HMOs per se but rather that they could be told they can’t get all the care they want. That view will remain.

I don’t think Cowen’s got this right. Or, rather, while people will naturally always want “all the care they want,” people’s desire to obtain health care is large part a result of their interaction with the health care system. If I’m feeling ill and want the doctor to prescribe me some antibiotics, but then he says “no no no, you have madeupitis and if you take antibiotics you’ll die” then suddenly it seems I don’t want the antibiotics anymore. Medical treatment isn’t fun, people don’t just want treatment for no reason. If you convince them that the treatment isn’t useful, they really won’t want it.

But that means the person saying “no” needs to be credible, needs to be someone you trust. And I agree with Krugman that a representative of a for-profit company probably isn’t it. The company has good reason to deny you coverage that may really be useful — they just don’t want to pay. And if the circumstances are right, it can even be in the HMO’s interest for you to do. That’s an ugly business and naturally people react differently to being told “no” by a company like that than they would to being counseled by someone they trust.

I think the real question for liberals looking for cost controls is whether the government can play that role. In many countries, public employees and public agencies really are trusted as custodians of the public interest in the necessary sort of way. And in America some public employees and agencies are trusted like that — the military is treated with extraordinary respect and deference, as are firefighters and in some communities the police are. Vast power is granted to the Federal Reserve with a general sense that it’s well-staffed by well-meaning people who can be counted on to do the right thing. But most agencies don’t attract that level of respect. The challenge would be to build not just a public agency, but a public agency that people think of as being like the Fed or the Marines, rather than one like the DC Child and Family Services Agency. That’s a tall order, but not necessarily an impossible one.

Podcastin’

Back when I was in college and writing a blog, nobody even knew what a blog was. These days, though, the kids have all kinds of fancy new media including a podcast called The Progressive Student Voice which, as you can guess, is progressive politics for students. Yesterday I was interviewed for a segment on their latest episode talking mostly about Heads in the Sand and its applicability to our current political moment, but also a bit about blogging in general and the course of new media.

Pants on Fire V

Business Week: “This ad asserts a McCain campaign talking-point that Obama wouldn’t make time for wounded troops unless cameras were allowed to follow him, but did make time to work out at a gym. This, of course, is a lie. It’s a blatant lie.” But also the following scoop:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.

Straight talk!

The Good Times Roll

Profits way up at Exxon and Shell. That sounds to me like a good time to implement John McCain’s plan for a “summer holiday” tax cut for oil companies! After all, with all these skyrocketing profits their tax bill must be on the rise as well.

Artest to Houston

The competition in the Western Conference just gets tougher as Houston acquired Ron Artest in exchange for draft picks and Bobby Jackson. Good news for Houston. If only they could get some recycling bins.

Scherer on Tax Plans

I criticized Michael Scherer’s article comparing the McCain and Obama tax plans, but he’s done a great post at Swampland following up on the article and laying out very clearly why it is that Barack Obama’s plan would cut taxes for most people and how it differs from McCain’s plan.

Black Swans

Paul Krugman writes that you can’t think correctly about climate change unless you take adequate consideration of relatively unlikely scenarios for disaster. Psychologically, if there’s only a one or two percent change of something happening, we tend to put it in the “not going to happen” file. But sound policymaking would consider a one percent chance of a scenario in which billions die to be something worth worrying about.

I’ve been thinking about this lately as I re-read Watchmen inspired by the trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation. It’s a reminder that in the 1980s, and especially before the Reykjavik Summit there was enormous anxiety about nuclear war. In particular, the criticism that Ronald Reagan’s policies were likely to lead to a nuclear war was, though clearly not embraced by a majority, a fairly widespread and mainstream opinion. This comes out in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and “99 Red Balloons” among other places:

Obviously, in retrospect this was wrong. Consequently, from a certain point of view the Nuclear Freeze Movement people and critics of Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric look foolish. But when you think in terms of probabilities this isn’t necessarily right. Say that under Jimmy Carter’s policies there would have been a one percent chance of a nuclear war in the 1981-84 period whereas under Reagan’s more aggressive policies there was a three percent chance of such a war. That still gives a very good chance that Reaganism will work out — 97 percent is good odds — but still probably means that the Reagan option is a bad idea. But then of course things will probably turn out okay, making the skeptics look foolish, and perhaps unduly biasing future policymaking toward aggressive options.

Independent Streaks

Oftentimes policies designed to protect the environment involve difficult tradeoffs with economic growth. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we have bad policies in place that encourage people to use space or energy wastefully, and these policies are both bad for the environment and bad for economic growth — waste is bad. When confronted with such policies, politicians have an aggravating tendency to gesture in the direction of local culture suggesting that people in their jurisdictions just happen to have, as quirk, a strong desire to see resources used poorly. Thus via Robert Farley, we get Houston Mayor Bill White explaining why his city has such a low recycling rate:

“We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” said Mayor Bill White, who favors expanding the city’s recycling efforts. “Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated. But Houstonians can change, and change fast.”

As Farley says, when you read things like “25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as 10 years to get recycling bins from the city . . . the city says it cannot afford more bins” you start to wonder if an independent streak and an aversion to hype is really to blame here. Like maybe if the city provided bins to people who ask for bins, then more people would recycle. Or maybe we’re supposed to believe that Houston’s independent streak extends to a desire to have government services provided ineptly.

Photo by Flickr user dnorman used under a Creative Commons license

More Good News for McCain

Quinnipiac:

Obama Tour Doesn’t Help In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll Finds; Voters Care More About Energy Than Iraq — FLORIDA: Obama 46 – McCain 44; OHIO: Obama 46 – McCain 44; PENNSYLVANIA: Obama 49 – McCain 42.

That’s right — Obama’s tour didn’t help. He’s just winning in Ohio and winning in Florida. He must be shaking with terror.

Pants on Fire IV

St. Petersburg Times (Florida): “The Straight Talk Express has taken a nasty turn into the gutter. Sen. John McCain has resorted to lies and distortions in what sounds like an increasingly desperate attempt to slow down Sen. Barack Obama by raising questions about his patriotism. Instead of taking the Democrat down a few notches, these baseless attacks are raising more questions about the Republican’s campaign and his ability to control his temper.”

Obama Leading . . . Good News for McCain!

The LA Times asks “Where did Barack Obama’s mojo go?”:

A new CNN/Opinion Research poll out Wednesday shows that despite nine solid days of blanket media coverage from overseas with Barack Obama cheered by adoring throngs of Germans and parlez-vousing with the French, making a three-point shot in the Middle East and standing outside No. 10 Downing Street, the freshman Illinois Democratic presidential nominee to be Senator Barack Obama of Illinois stayed static in the polls despite his well-covered long foreign tripsenator is stuck right where he was in the polls before he left.

How bad are things for Obama? Pretty bad: “He still leads Republican Sen. John McCain 51-44. But it’s the same 51-44 as last time.” Do you think that if Obama wins, then the day after the election all the headlines will be about how he hasn’t yet really pulled away from McCain? Shouldn’t the whole “our nominee is consistently behind in the polls” thing be worrying Republicans?

The Myth of Polling

The obvious problem with the polls you see all the time about how the public feels about such and such an issue is that these surveys don’t tell you whether the people actually care about the issue or not. Taegan Goddard, meanwhile, glosses The Opinion Makers forthcoming from David W. Moore:

The author — a former senior editor of the Gallup Poll — says that today’s opinion polls misfire due to an intrinsic methodological problem: survey results don’t differentiate between “those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue.”

Kevin Drum is puzzled:

This is disturbing. Either Moore managed to find a publisher for a book thesis about as obvious as “college students like to drink,” or else Moore’s thesis actually isn’t as bog obvious as I think it is. I’m not sure which is worse.

Or there’s a third option: his thesis really is as obvious as I think it is, but everyone keeps pretending not to know it anyway. Which means it’s worth a book. Good luck, David!

I think that option number three is correct. Nobody who thinks about this stuff a lot could possibly fail to have thought of Moore’s point, but at the same time politicians and their aides very frequently do act as if they don’t understand this. I think the reason is that referring to polling data, even bad data, is a good CYA mechanism when you need to make difficult decisions. A consultant who says “we don’t have any valid data on this question, but I think you should do X” is going to get blamed if X doesn’t turn out right. But if he can point to some data, and say that he’s not making the recommendation, he’s just pointing to the numbers then if things go south it isn’t really his fault.

This is a pretty common organizational flaw. The natural tendency is to try to maximize whatever it is that you have a good measurement of, even if the measured quantity is only questionably related to what you’re trying to do. Politicians know how to get an issue poll in the field, and there aren’t great metrics for getting the information you would really want. So campaigns often go to war with the data they have, even while knowing that the data’s no good.

The Shoe Factor

If I may return to the question of John McCain’s $520 Salvatore Ferragamo Pregiato Moccasins imported from Italy, I want to say that I think the fact that McCain is an extremely wealthy man is more legitimately relevant to the campaign than a lot of liberals seem willing to credit. If it turned out that back in his State Senate days Barack Obama passed some laws that massively increased the value of a parcel of land he owned, people would report on that story. Or if John McCain was a major stockholder in a defense contracting firm and used his clout on the Armed Services Committee to steer contracts in their direction, people would consider that a relevant factor. And if a governor somewhere were dipping into the state treasury and transferring the money into personal accounts, people would care.

So when you look at something like the distributive impact of Barack Obama’s tax plans versus the distributive impact of John McCain’s tax plans, it doesn’t strike me as ludicrous to say that people ought to spend some time pondering the fact that McCain is a member of the small minority of people who would have higher after tax income under his plan than under Obama’s:

On the merits, of course, bad policy is bad policy irrespective of who proposes it. Repealing the estate tax would be a bad idea even if John McCain had no kids, and even if the McCain family didn’t own eleven houses. But still, self-dealing holds a special role in conventional political discussions, and it’s not for nothing that McCain makes a big deal out of the ideas of honor and sacrifice as campaign themes.

Pants on Fire III

Consortium of Ohio newspapers rates this ad a zero out of ten on the accuracy scale:

Describing Barack Obama’s support for a cap and trade plan as a tax on electricity when McCain is also trying to get credit for breaking with Bush and supporting a cap and trade plan is doubleplus good.

Defending Housing Vouchers

Greg Anrig and Harold Pollack argue that Hannah Rosin was overreading the evidence when she concluded that Section 8 rental vouchers were responsible for a crime spike in the Memphis area.

Afghans for Obama

Sam Stein had the opportunity to hear Said Jawad, who’s been Afghanistan’s ambassador to the USA since 2003, talk about the national security situation and reports that while Jawad avoided any specific mention of Barack Obama or John McCain, he broadly endorsed what Obama has been saying about Afghanistan. It seems, in short, that both Iraqi and Afghan leaders agree that Obama is right and Bush is wrong about the need to rebalance away from Iraq and toward Afghanistan.