McCain, Dowd Substitute Mockery for Understanding
You understand why politics might get up to dumb gimmicks. They’re trying to get press, they’re trying to get elected, whatever. But even though lots of people do it, I genuinely don’t understand why someone would go into political journalism despite a total lack of interest in trying to actually inform the public. If you want to operate with a reckless disregard for the consequences of your actions, there’s a lot more money to be had in banking. At any rate, Maureen Dowd loves John McCain’s Twitter feed:
$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. …
$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” …
$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.
The tattoo removal anti-crime program has already been dealt with in some detail. But it’s worth dwelling on this for a bit. The cost per-prisoner of incarcerating someone for a year is enormous. If this program generates as little as ten person-years less of imprisonment that’s a net fiscal benefit to the government even if you ignore the benefits of reducing crime which, obviously, would be absurd. In other words, the marginal benefit of preventing a serious violent crime is extremely high—much higher than might be apparent if you didn’t bother to consider the issue at all. Which is exactly how McCain proceeds.
As Jon Chait says:
And McCain’s method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anything that sounds silly. He’s clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. [...] I don’t know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it’s a boondoggle. I don’t know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there’s a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.
I’m just a blogger, not a U.S. Senator or a powerful newspaper columnist with access to a research assistant, but it’s not so difficult to make some inquiries into this sort of thing. What’s the deal with Mormon crickets? Well “Mormon crickets become pests very sporadically (about once or twice in a decade) when populations build to high levels and they migrate over large areas. If an alfalfa field is in the path of a migration, Mormon crickets can cause severe damage by devouring the plants.” Are Mormon crickets a problem this year? It seems they are. Now that bit of Googling is hardly the last word on this, but we’re at least getting somewhere. Dowd and McCain both have a lot of resources at their disposal and big megaphones—maybe they should try to figure this stuff out and help people distinguish the worthy programs from the wasteful ones instead of just making jokes.
90 Responses to “McCain, Dowd Substitute Mockery for Understanding”
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March 4th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Reading the Dowd column last night, it took me a while to realize that even Dowd could be so shallow and dim to be congratulating McCain for his efforts to expose wasteful spending – I was certain she would be pointing out that McCain was taking cheap shots from a position of deliberate, even willful ignorance. Because that’s what anyone with half a brain would do on seeing McCain’s absurd tweets.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Are you sure you aren’t just talking about Mormons? I am sure many would support spending 1 million dollars for Mormon control.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
You can bet that McCain would be interested in controlling those crickets if he was trying to get them off his lawn.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
You know what’s really funny about this? How little power John McCain has in the Republican Party.
All the instant outrage about the marsh mouse? That was from talking points. You’d think McCain’s twitters about “worthless” earmarks would be immediately copied by a million blog trolls and conservatives on TV in the same way, but no. He’s just an angry old man, screaming at nothing.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
McCain is a shallow, incurious man. Dowd is a shallow, fatuous woman.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Why can’t the people who are affected by the crickets in Utah pay for this?
March 4th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
You know what would help former gang members escape their past? Tax cuts for the rich. Then the rich entrepeneurs could use those tax cuts to fund new business ventures. Business ventures that wouldn’t hire the former gang members, well, because they used to be gang members. Rich business owners don’t stay in business hiring criminals after all…
March 4th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Al, you moron. Jon Stewart remains popular on the left — for mocking eminently mock-able morons like yourself, and Rushbo, Steele, Cantor, Pence, etc, etc.
The programs identified in the budget, however, are not worthy of mockery — they are good, effective, and smart programs. It’s like how it’s right to mock the Detroit Lions — they suck! 0-16! — but it would seem pretty weird to mock the Steelers right now.
Well, Obama and these programs are pretty much like the Steelers. And the GOP wrecking crew and you are the Detroit Lions.
Suck. On. That.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
You’d think anyone who’d ever heard the phrase “plague of locusts” would understand why pest management is important in agriculture.
I guess you’d be wrong.
It’s like they’re proud of being stupid.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Al, mock away.
Certainly you have legitimate things to mock about, like the tax problems of Obama’s cabinet nomineees.
Nobody cares that McCain is mocking. The problem is that he’s mocking about REALLY DUMB STUFF. Like, the most trivial things imaginable. And what he’s doing doesn’t even make sense, since the programs he’s picked are actually useful programs that don’t cost very much.
It just makes him look old and confused. Not that we really care, it’s amusing.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Re Warren Terra
As I have said on numerous occasions, Maureen Dowd is a disgrace to the New York Times editorial page. One only wonders who she blew to get that column.
Re Jon Chait
Relative to astronomy, the largers telescope in the world, the Kek 10 meter instrument, is located in Hawaii.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Why can’t the people who are affected by the crickets in Utah pay for this?
Jamie: was that snark, or were you asking that question seriously? Because the answer is: for the same reason people affected by Hurricane Katrina can’t pay for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Problems like disaster relief and multi-state pest control are simply beyond the scope of entities that don’t have the reach and resources of the Federal government.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Wouldn’t they have to, you know, read it first?
I guess we’ll just have to wait.
In the meantime, Dowd is an airhead, but we knew that. She put proposals she didn’t know anything about against a promise Obama never made. Then again, if she wasn’t stupid, she would make a good Republican puke-funnel.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Thank God that idiot lost the election.
As for Hawaii, a lot of very important astronomy gets done out there. You’re far away from air pollution (although light pollution is becoming a bigger problem), reasonably close to the Equator (which means you can see more of the total sky), and those massive volcanic mountains get you physically closer to space–all absolutely wonderful qualities for visible light astronomy. Some of the most powerful telescopes ever built are out there. But John McCain is a grumpy old curmudgeon who presumably doesn’t care about American leadership in science. When did science ever produce a job?
Maureen Dowd is, of course, a vapid, silly, insubstantial nitwit whose absurdity is matched only by her self-importance. She is the living symbol of everything that is wrong with political commentary in this country and a disgrace to a profession that is increasingly hard to disgrace.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Whenever McCain goes off on another of his tirades against programs that he thinks sound silly, I’m reminded of Krusty the Clown.
“And hey, the phonebook, don’t get me started. They’ve got yellow pages, AND the blue pages now? What’s up with that, huh?”
Lisa: “Yellow pages are for business listings and blue pages are for government listings.”
Krusty: “Oh, uhh, yeah. I guess that does make sense.”
March 4th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
“Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted.
He really believes that his “bears” line was a huge hit, and now he’s trying to copy it with even lamer results. I can’t believe any of us were ever worried that he might stand a chance of being elected President.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I’m not sure why Chait or McCain might think that Hawaii sounds like a “silly” place to do astronomy; but, in fact, it’s one of the best places in the world to do astronomy. Specifically, the top of Mauna Kea, which is an altitude of 13,780 feet and extremely clear skies. As the linked site says:
An old friend of mine worked at the SMA; there’s a ton of great science going on in Hawaii.
So far, I don’t think I’ve seen a single criticism of funding in the stimulus bill that doesn’t smack of knownothingism. It’s egregious. It reminds me of Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” Awards, which were often plainly ignorant of the importance and utility of the programs he was ridiculing. Frequently, science of one form or another were targeted because, I suppose, Proxmire, most Senators, and pretty much everyone else are utterly clueless about science and research. Even though they experience the benefits of them every day.
This recalls a famous quote by Michael Faraday about his research into electromagnetism:
…which, interestingly, I’ve noticed from a Google search to be commonly misattributed to Franklin. Supposing, I guess, that many Americans believe Franklin discovered electricity and someone along the way altered the attribution. And you know, of course, that Henry Ford invented the automobile. [end sarcasm]
March 4th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
J: Don’t sell Jon Stewart short now. He take some deserved shots at Obama too, namely how is Iraq policy is curiously similar to Bush’s (point cleverly made with one of of the trademark Daily Show rapid-fire video montages).
March 4th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Also, and pardon my French: what the fuck is Maureen Dowd talking about King Lear for?
March 4th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Promotion of astronomy?
March 4th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Shorter John McCain:
“Let the bears pay the bear tax. I pay the Homer tax!”
March 4th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I’m not sure why Chait or McCain might think that Hawaii sounds like a “silly” place to do astronomy…
I’m pretty sure Chait was being sarcastic. At least I hope so.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Jesus Mary and Joseph, what a couple of fatheads.
In SLC, there is a monument to seagulls. It seems that, back when the territory was being settled, there was an awful plague of locusts — which might as well be crickets, for the purposes of this discussion — that threatened to devour much of the food supply grown there. Attracted by this buffet, seagulls flew inland and gobbled up the locusts, saving the good. This is obviously a food-chain event, but the Mormons reckoned it as a miracle and built a monument to the divinely inspired intervention of the seagulls.
So, yes, there is some historical import to making sure funny-sounding bugs don’t eat, like, every plant in the state.
Christ on a hockey stick.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Here’s a link.
http://www.lds.org/placestovisit/location/0,10634,1885-1-1-1,00.html
March 4th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
M questions promotion of astronomy in #21.
You can argue about anything but what goes on in Hawaii with regard to astronomy and why there is well-explained higher up in the comments.
With regard to whether or not it should be promoted, it might seem silly to some until one thinks about how much charting of near-Earth asteroids and comets goes on.
That doesn’t sound silly at all to me.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
One would think that the ever growing (and hungry) Mormon cricket problem would be noticed by a senator from an adjoining state. We’ve many a distraction here in Las Vegas and the crickets make more than one headline during the spring and summer months as they migrate and breed across southern Nevada and I’m sure into northern Arizona. But stupid appears to be the next big thing for the GOP and with Rush and now Maureen, they’re well on the way to cornering the global market.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
It’s pretty amusing that John McCain is against investment in astronomy. It is probably one of the highest-payoff industries there is in terms of residual technological benefits.
He’s a good man, but he really ought not oppose stuff like this. It is misinformed and unfortunate.
Although all those agricultural subsidies (yeah right, blueberry research, my ass) are pretty bullocks.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
It’s not just because the Feds have more resources. If a bug is affecting potatoes in Idaho, and it causes the cost of potatoes to skyrocket, that doesn’t just affect Idahoans. It affects everyone who buys Idaho potatoes. If a hurricane New Orleans closes ports that are important to importing and exporting goods, and moving them up and down the Mississippi, it doesn’t just affect Louisianians. If affects people all over the country. The Federal government helps pay for these things because people all over the country are impacted by them.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Maureen Dowd should not be writing op-ed pieces for the NYT. She is more suited for a site like wonkette but the wonkette people are actually funny. Her specialty is making fairly banal social observations about politicians and then pepper them with pop pyschology and pop references.
I have not read her in years. Same for Brooks. He has a similar knack for making an op-ed out of his observation of some person buying whole sale ice cream at Sams Club.
The only interesting columnists at NYT are Krugman, Kristof and Cohen.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
This is the same pseudo-macho, anti-intellectual bullsh*t Republicans and others always pull about any kind of government funding for programs that just sound ‘odd’ to them.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Myles,
Research into cranberries created the “white cranberry” industry, which has sales in the hundreds of millions annually.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
I was surprised to learn that Dowd won a Pulitzer, but a quick search revealed:
We got a great press…
Since Kristol left, it is difficult to say if Dowd or Friedman is the worse NYTimes columnist, but at least Friedman did some real journalism once.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
The only interesting columnists at NYT are Krugman, Kristof and Cohen.
I would add Herbert, since so few pundits ever write about the poor.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
No, Paul Krugman is a humourless blowhard. You just have to read Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, and Waugh to realise what ludicrous, contemptible characters those sorts of people are. Constantly apocalyptic.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
What character in Wodehouse do you see as similar to Nobel Prize-winning, our current predicament-predicting Paul Krugman, Myles? I can’t wait.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
[of McCain] He’s a good man, but…
It was ground well covered before the election, but it bears (haha) repeating:
How many he’s-a-good-man-buts does a person get before one should just start dropping that initial tick and skipping straight to the part after the but? McCain, at least, has probably exceeded his quota.
Also, agricultural research ain’t, in general, the same as subsidies. Research is usually pretty cheap, and if anything there ought to be a LOT more of it. Particularly into things like farming with minimal environmental impact.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Off topic a bit: But I’m also feeling cranky about the Tom Friedman column today — not just in the way VF poked at it. He claims that if you type ‘mere’ in Google, you will get “Meredith Whitney” — ummm, not when I try it. She’s not even at the top of a search for ‘Meredith’ when I google.
Likewise, he says ‘ba’ will return Bank of America first and Barack Obama 3rd — I guess I’m in a different universe than Friedman, but that’s not how my google works either.
Bonus randomness – the Utah Seagull stories reported above are the explanation for why Utah’s state bird is the oddly named ‘California Gull’
xyz
March 4th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Copy-and-paste of post at:
http://not-that-sane.blogspot.com/2009/03/ugly-anti-science-streak.html
John McCain is against “wasteful spending” and chooses to pick on:
$2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York.
$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah.
$819,000 for catfish genetics research in Alabama.
$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii
Even if the New York Times can not be bothered to explain the importance of these programs, maybe I can try to check them out in a few minutes of Googling:
1. The Center for Grape Genetics is at Cornell; the original agricultural station was established in 1882. It might have been better to fund this through the NSF, but studying agriculture is not per se bogus, as McCain seems to imply.
2. The Mormon Cricket is a highly destructive species, and can cause destruction of large amounts of cropland, and so is well-worth controlling.
3. The catfish genetic research seems to go to Auburn and again, is probably better funded through competition. But the idea itself is not bad.
4. Hawaii, with its clear skies, is a pre-eminent astronomy site. Why they need to promote it further is beyond me. This sort of promotion is an out-and-out boondoggle. McCain may have a point here.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
McCain is heckling. If he were interested in governing he’d learn how to use a search engine before twittering.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
@ #39 from xyz
My best guess would be that Google is guessing about what you are interested in and/or about what Tom Friedman is interested in, based on any number of factors (your past online activities, especially using Google, what your IP address says about where you are and how you are accessing the web, etcetera. Google’s goal has very openly been to customize the online experience as much as possible, so as to deliver to each person what they want to find, and make good money doing so, especially from their knowledge of your interests.
For what it’s worth, if I type “Mere” into the address bar of my Google Chrome browser, Meredith Whitney is recommended, and if I type “Ba” into the bar then Bank Of America’s website is recommended (well, mainly Balloon Juice, but I visit there often and I’ve never visited B of A’s site). So for some sorts of people Friedman isn’t wrong. But that doesn’t prove he’s right about most people, and you obviously prove that he isn’t right about everyone.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Jon Stewart mocked me? Dang. I missed that episode.
not you personally – people LIKE you.
reading comprehension – it’s not just for the fifth grade any more.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I think it’s got to be “Miley Fink-Nottle” from now on, no?
What, what, old fruit!
March 4th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Off topic a bit: But I’m also feeling cranky about the Tom Friedman column today — not just in the way VF poked at it. He claims that if you type ‘mere’ in Google, you will get “Meredith Whitney” — ummm, not when I try it. She’s not even at the top of a search for ‘Meredith’ when I google.
Likewise, he says ‘ba’ will return Bank of America first and Barack Obama 3rd — I guess I’m in a different universe than Friedman, but that’s not how my google works either.
He’s talking about the Google auto-complete feature, not an actual search. If you type “mere” into the Google search field, it will suggest “meredith whitney” as your search term. If you actually *search* for the word “mere”, you will get something different.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
You’re suggesting work? Clearly you don’t understand how the columnist gig works.
March 4th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Those crazy conservatives want to spend billions of dollars on FANCIFUL FLYING MACHINES armed with special exploding fireworks, in order to possibly fight *snort* countries on the other side of an OCEAN!
And on big chunks of rock for people (probably people in SPECIAL INTERESTS!) to travel over in special metal pods powered by dinosaur bones! How absurd!
Why, they even want to spend YOUR TAX DOLLARS to fund a “special camp” (most likely some sort of resort) for TERRORISTS in beautiful tropical Cuba! The nerve!
March 4th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Remember when McCain was excused from using computers because his fingers were hopelessly broken?
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/09/obama-ad-email.html
Who sends his tweets?
March 4th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Brendan Skwire is doing a fabulous job of tearing Doud’s tripe – you really should see it
http://www.brendancalling.com/
March 4th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
The point of criticizing earmarks isn’t that they’re all wasteful. It’s that they’re inserted with no debate and no transparency. They’re also frequently diverting federal money to pay for what should be local, state, or private sector programs.
I don’t know if John McCain realizes any of this, and I’m almost certain that Maureen Dowd doesn’t.
March 4th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Western NY is one of the largest grape growing regions and wine producers in the US. This ’silly’ industry is a major component of my local economy. My region and its economic needs are at least deserving of thoughtful consideration-minus the snark, Mr. McCain!
March 4th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
And now we know why print journalism and political conservatism are both imploding these days: it’s all ignorance, all the time.
It’s funny for a bit, but after awhile it’s just useless.
Who is gonna go for useless?
March 4th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
The King Lear today was to compare McCain to a senile old man blustering about his lost fortunes. In the words of Lear himself:
March 4th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Wiley, that was the best description I’ve heard for it. This kind of thing drives me crazy. Yes there is a lot of waste in government budgets, I think everyone can agree that this happens, but the sniping drives me crazy. Picking things that “sound wacky” without really exploring whether they are, how they got in the legislation to begin with and how to really constructively fix the problem. I’m so tired of governance by sound bite.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I had heard about McCain’s stupid beaver crack, and when I saw the others Matt sampled (without me paying attention to the context), I thought they were parodies. I gave Dowd too much credit.
Poe’s Law, inverted…
March 4th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I really don’t understand why anyone respects Paul Krugman, or why anyone would award him the Nobel, consider what an awful, shrill, and narrow personality he is. Krugman is an pretentious, vulgar intellectual snob of the first order; a preposterous, unreconstructed socialist; an ivory-tower head-in-the-clouds egghead of the worst sort; a latter-day Adlai Stevenson meshed together with the gruesome demeanour of Michael Dukakis and the visceral nastiness of Lyndon Johnson. Nothing sort of a psychological human pariah.
And frankly, I am sick and tired of seeing his atrocious collar gape (unpleasantly conspicuously) on TV. He actually even does it with button-downs sometimes (I really don’t know how it’s humanly possible to have collar gapes with button-downs.) For god’s sakes, either get some new shirts, or lose some neck circumference.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Since I’ve actually seen a Mormon cricket I can pose as an expert even though I’m not. (It was at the remarkable Border Inn, the one motel I’ve been to my kids refuse ever to return to — the Nevada Utah border runs through the middle of the place, and at one end they have a piano with a Mormon hymnal and at the other they have slot machines. In the rooms they have the owner’s old New Yorkers.)
My understanding is that the locusts that plagued the American West are extinct — the crickets are still here, and can get around. The “California Gull” — hated in California as a beach pest, loved in Utah — breeds on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake, and I think it would be easier for gentiles like me to get into the Temple than to violate their breeding grounds. Like the nutria and beaver in my last post, it should be pretty clear why the gulls (a protected species, I’ve been told) and the crickets are a Federal rather than a state issue.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
“because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.”
What a dick. Perhaps John’s just pissed because the dollars aren’t going to that other US astronomy mecca, AZ. Or perhaps they are! Must look.
Or, perhaps he prefers that the science get outsourced to Chile?
In either case, the astronomers I know net a bit less than a pipe fitter or concrete mason on overtime, so John can bite me with the “average American” BS.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
There’s a knee jerk republican and then there’s just a jerk republican. John McCain is both and more.
It is amazing how much of this kind of hargangue some people just gobble up without a bit of “I wonder if that’s true” or “I wonder what his/her motivation and/or reasoning is” or “is there some facts to backup his/her opinion or is he/she just bloviating?
It boggles the mind. People should be googling their minds instead of boggling mine. Is so easy to frame an info request with the Google search box that could easily add some factual basis to your ignorance.
We could spend some education bucks to include rudimentary critical thinking as a core skill a little bit before one gets a PhD at MIT or Harvard say in Junior High. Its the signature skill that should be separating us from primates not making primates look smart in comparison.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
One would think that the party that poses as the defender of rural America and its values would want much, much more federally funded research in the field of agricultural pest control. Developing more environmentally friendly and sophisticated methods to control insect pests is actually a tremendously important issue, as insects’ ability for rapid evolution means that they can quickly become resistant to many of the pesticides we use. Whoops, I forgot, some of John McCain’s buddies don’t believe in evolution either.
I work in a pretty closely related area, so this is near and dear to my heart. This is, actually, one of the prime reasons that in spite of my socially conservative views on some issues, I can’t conceive of voting Republican. At bottom, they are deeply unserious people who would rather make a cheap joke or score a political point than address serious questions- about the best use of natural resources, or about anything else.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Did anybody else stop for a second to think how this might be praise or an insult of SLC (our poster here, not the city)?
Did anybody read it as such and immediately, and vehemently agree?
March 4th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
I imagine that is just one of the many simple things you don’t understand – along with where babies come from, why the sky is blue or why you can’t just eat candy when it tastes so good.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Being an astronomer, and knowing lots of other astronomers, I can vouch to say that we’re pretty average Americans. And, as you can see from the following website:
http://cdm.berkeley.edu/doku.php?id=astrophysicsjobs
faculty hires in astronomy this year in America are plagued by the dreaded “search cancelled”. Many US universities, especially public universities, have hiring freezes in place (including, unfortunately, the University of Arizona). The European institutions have suffered less, especially in Germany, so there is actually brain drain from the US to institutions abroad.
As another commenter noted above, Arizona is prime US real estate for astronomy (second only to Hawaii). So McCain’s comments are definitely suspect for this regard. But as a US senator, I would imagine he’d rather build expensive telescopes in Hawaii rather than, say, in Chile were the sites are arguably better. The astronomical community has a couple of plans for next-generation ground telescopes that will cost of order ~$1 billion (~an order of magnitude more than construction costs for the Keck telescopes in Hawaii). But such a telescope, which will be a phenomenal addition to US astronomical research, will not be built without some funding (likely) from the NSF. And it certainly does create jobs, much in the same way that military contracting does (sometimes by the same companies). Next-generation telescope infrastructures are the SUPERTRAINS of US astronomy, and they have real benefits scientifically.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:33 am
I’m glad that I’m not the only one who’s heard of the Keck Observatory. It’s only one of the largest optical telescopes in the world.
It seems to me that it’s incredibly important for bloggers like Matt to immediately (and loudly) draw attention to the absurd claims and remarks coming from the right at the moment. Keep it up. Now if only the national media would get on board.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:41 am
Wow. Either you don’t know anything about Krugman, or you don’t know anything about socialism. Or both.
I’m betting on “both”.
I’ve mentioned this before, but as someone who’s been reading Krugman for fifteen years, I find attacks like that quoted above to be quite amazing and disconcerting given that, say, in 1998 Krugman was being attacked as a right-wing free-trader globalist shill and being vocally defended by people like our Myles.
It’s not that his beliefs and politics have really changed. He’s a moderate Democrat who, like other economists who are moderate Democrats (for example, Brad DeLong), are nevertheless staunch supporters or markets and free trade. He went to the NYT on the basis of his decade of experience as a successful popularizer of economics who also happened to be eminent in his field (a rare combination). He wrote about economics; and only politics when it involves economics.
As it happened, however, his move to the NYT as a columnist corresponded to a period of a notably mendacious White House. I think Krugman had been heretofore a bit naive about these things—given a position where he was writing to a mass audience on a wider variety of subjects, he professionally focused on the politics of the Executive Branch and, like many of us, became very pissed-off.
I didn’t much like his writing his NYT column for a while because I had come to treasure his authoritative yet comprehensible popularizing of difficult economic concepts and I felt being another angry pundit was something pretty much anyone could do, while what he had been doing was something almost no one could do. Furthermore, he wasn’t an old, washed-up academic, he was in the prime of his career (though arguably he peaked too early as a prodigy) and I felt that being a pundit was beneath him when he could be doing good economic work at the highest level.
I still sort of feel this way; but history has largely proven my judgment wrong. Firstly, he wasn’t just another pundit—the fact that he was an outsider and that he had his academic career and great respectability meant that he wasn’t beholden to the Washington elite in the way that all the other pundits are. He could say things others couldn’t or wouldn’t. Secondly, I think that his national popular profile means that now, at the crucial moment when suddenly macroeconomics is something discussed around every dinner table, he’s in the position to play a role that he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to play. And he’s doing so, and doing it fairly well.
Anyway, I’m sure that all the conservatives out there will take issue with my characterization of his competency and some other things; but I hope that some of you will realize that A) he’s not a socialist, or even much of progressive. He’s a moderate liberal with a long and documented history promoting a number of public economic policies that conservatives support and progressives/leftists oppose; and, B) he truly is a brilliant and highly respected economist who won the most prestigious prize for young economists, has held several eminent positions at elite universities, and was awarded his (sort of) Nobel Prize for highly technical, uncontroversial, and groundbreaking work on international trade theory.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Re: in 1998 Krugman was being attacked as a right-wing free-trader globalist shill and being vocally defended by people like our Myles.
Some of us, including me, still do this. (The attacking from the left, I mean, not the defending from the right).
March 5th, 2009 at 1:34 am
We were ignoring you the first time, Myles.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:48 am
My theory on Myles: he’s the creation of some aspiring novelist, hoping to write the next Confederacy of Dunces. Myles is a character he’s been working on, a 21st century Ignatius Reilly. Playing around with a characer like this online might actually be a good way to get a feel for him.
The alternative explanation is simply too horrifying to contemplate.
March 5th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Strange thing about McCain’s astronomy rant is that astronomy is major source of employment in Tuscon. If new telescopes are built for Hawaii they would more than likely be manufactured in Tuscon at a cost of many tens of million dollars, money that would flow in wages and business sales to Arizona residents. (The University of Arizona operates what is arguably the premier large telescope manufacturing facility in the world as part of an astronomy technology program that trains engineers, technicians and scientists in the skills needed to build and maintain large telescopes including the optics and computers.) McCain confuses being a maverick with being irrational.
March 5th, 2009 at 9:25 am
I really don’t understand why anyone respects Paul Krugman, or why anyone would award him the Nobel, consider what an awful, shrill, and narrow personality he is.
Remind me again here — when did they add a personality component to the criteria for selecting Nobel Prize winners?
March 5th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Can we be honest about this: this whole thing (including Dowd’s fawning) is related to McCain’s use of Twitter. I’m being wholly serious here. Yes, McCain has been saying a lot of this stuff on TV too (there was a whole thing about Beaver management, but I guess McCain doesn’t understand how falling trees and diverted streams can be an environment and safety issue), but I really think this is all about being able to say, “McCain twittered,” as if this simple act has restored McCain’s mavericky maverickness.
He didn’t just go on TV to claim something stupid, silly and uninformed…he twittered it!
March 5th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Seeing as Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific, and thus has far less in terms of ambient light to deal with than anywhere in the 48 states, it could well be an ideal place for astronomy research.
McCain lost more states than any Republican Presidential candidate since Goldwater, right? Why do we have to listen to him any longer? Sound bites do not good governance make.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:16 am
@66
What Keith clearly does not understand is that anybody who attacks Bush and/or Greenspan (and Krugman has done both, repeatedly) is clearly a socialist!
That’s all the argument you need to make.
Right?
People don’t want to be bothered with “annoying” things like facts, when they can rely upon their gut prejudices with such confidence!
March 5th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Matt:
You write with such authority and self-assurance but I have my suspicions that you are uninformed about economics. How many credits did you take in college in economics courses?
March 5th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
You only have to read about the first 30 pages of Russell Kirk’s loving treatise on conservatism, THE CONSERVATIVE MIND to realize that prejudice is one of the pillars of the conservative mental process. The others are ignorance, magical thinking, and the presentation of false choices. Kirk, channelling Edmund Burke, is actually quite proud of it all. You have no idea how much I wish I was making this up.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Maureen Dowd: Snark without substance.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
A few notes “from the fields.”
National Science Foundation doesn’t do Ag research. That would be USDA. USDA ag research includes the Agricultural Research Service, which both makes grants and performs research itself, often at facilities co-located at Agricultural Experiment Stations, which are in turn hosted by the land-grant colleges & universities, whose support is the other main USDA contribution to ag research.
Some ag research is basic, can be done anywhere, and therefore migrates to the University of California and to a lesser extent Cornell and maybe even Texas A&M especially if it involves bovine testicles. But ag research in general is “applied,” and is best done regionally. Which is why they do catfish research in Alabama and Mississippi, and grape research in New York (where they need a lot of help) and in Davis. It would be nice (says this Californian) to have a lot more Federal matching (to encourage state and grower-supported research, of which we have a whole lot out here in the Vale of Fruits, Nuts and Flakes), but the tradition, dating back to the earliest days of the U.S. agricultural research endeavor (1863 under the Great Republican is the date I like) is to have Congress dicker over the regional distribution. The Mormon Cricket, control thereof, does need control, and since it effects crops in several states (Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho and Montana come to mind) it seems an appropriate use of Federal $$. Fortunately those states are overrepresented in Congress and can therefore get the $$. Perhaps Senator McCain doesn’t like patterns of representation in the Intermountain West.
The case for regional earmarks in National Science Foundation funding is weak, so say the least. But Congressional influence on the programmatic distribution of NSF funding is reasonable (like: how much into Computer Engineering, how much into mathematics, etc.) Some of that, like the part of the Astronomy budget that goes to facilities, is inherently regional: telescope money will go mostly to Hawaii, Arizona, or to the international projects in South America. That is where the good sky is. My cynical view is that McCain is about as popular in Tucson (home of the University of Arizona) as he is in the rest of the Science Archipelago, and he is happy enough to antagonize those pointy-head intellectuals. Berkeley in the Desert and all that.
Finally, I am reminded in the Mormon Cricket flap of one of the all-time great pranks played on the floor of the House of Representatives. I saw this on a film that was shown in the late 1980s to the National Science Foundation’s Program Officers Training Course (after which we all went out and watched Revenge of the Nerds at the local cinema…).
Somebody had managed to slip the name of a really salacious grant, or rather the really salacious name of a grant (probably from USDA) to a Dixiecrat from Mississippi. The film started with the Honorable Gentleman bloviating about how his constituents would be mad as hell to learn that their tax dollars were being WASTED investigating the Sex Life of the Screw Worm. Maureen Dowd would have been proud. Finally the gent sat down, yielding the floor to his good friend from the Great State of Tennessee (who we all knew as the NSF’s great friend in Congress and who worked closely with my friends in the Engineering directorate to coordinate the merger of Bitnet, DARPANet, and NSFNet to form the internet but that is another story).
Alas for Danny Dixiecrat, the representative from Tennessee was very well briefed, and explained to Danny not only how many of his constituents raised cattle, and how many head of cattle there were in his district and in the rest of Mississippi, but what the estimated losses to the Mississippi cattle and dairy industry had been over the previous two decades to the Screw Worm Fly, and then described what the accomplishments of the Screw Worm program had been over the last decade, and that interfering with the breeding cycle of the screw worm fly was at the core of efforts to control the pest, and that perhaps the Honorable Colleague from Mississippi could appreciate that an investigations of the Sex Life of the Screw Worm was part of this effort, and that the constituents in Mississippi might not have the views on the research that the Honorable Colleague ascribed to them…
March 5th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Some of us, including me, still do this. (The attacking from the left, I mean, not the defending from the right).
Good lord, you are a Neanderthal.
You only have to read about the first 30 pages of Russell Kirk’s loving treatise on conservatism, THE CONSERVATIVE MIND to realize that prejudice is one of the pillars of the conservative mental process.
Yes, prejudice for tradition, order, and prejudice for a humility acknowledging that the human rational mind cannot, even at its best, understand necessarily every detail of how our world works and what makes it work, and understanding that society is not something we can design or engineer inorganically and disregarding those invisible, unknowable unconscious traditions which hold us together.
Not how a modern liberal would define prejudice.
March 5th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
North Vietnam would have done U.S. democracy a BIG favor had they
sent John McCain to Soviet Siberia for permanent residence.
March 6th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Could Mormon crickets be more economically cured by one of those anti-cult exorcists?
March 14th, 2009 at 10:54 am
The folks who vilify people like Mccain for exposing earmarks should be ashamed.
Our country is nearly $20 trillion in debt, or over a quarter million per family of four. This number does not include unfunded SS, medicaire or medicaid liabilities which amount to roughly 1.3 million per family of four.
If “mormon cricket control” or any of these other programs has any benefit can be debated in some circumstances. But its not the governments job to pay for every expense for every person. If these programs were truly beneficial, people would pay for them themselves.
March 17th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
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March 18th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Wicked blog – the guys commenting here are full of it! I’ll be keeping up with your posts
March 18th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
the comments here are having a laugh – i’ve added your blog to my netvibes account, keep up the good work
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