Matt Yglesias

Coal Groups Want to Block Health Reform to Kill Clean Energy

One crucially important, but not-so-well-understood aspect of American politics is that business groups in the U.S. tend to behave in a highly ideological, highly solidaristic manner rather than as narrow interest groups. For example, check out this interesting item from my colleague Lee Fang:

Corporate front groups and large business trade associations are funneling their resources into defeating health reform. Even though health reform will lower costs for small businesses and boost worker productivity economy-wide, it appears that corporate entities influenced by major polluters are hoping that the defeat of health care legislation will slow President Obama’s agenda and derail their true enemy: clean energy reform.

The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, which is largely backed by the coal industry, candidly revealed this strategy in a letter released today to Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Robert Byrd (D-WV). The Chamber of Commerce demanded that the senators use “their clout and seniority” to obstruct the health reform debate until cap and trade legislation is taken off the table and the EPA is barred from regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. As Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette noted, Rockefeller has already rejected a similar proposal of blocking health reform unless the EPA stops reviewing mountaintop removal permits. The coal lobby has also pressured West Virginia state legislators to pass resolutions opposing clean energy reform.

Part of what’s interesting about this is that, as a matter of logic, you could easily imagine trying to run this play in the other direction. The WV Chamber of Commerce could be working with Senators Rockefeller & Byrd to cement a broad, bipartisan alliance between WV legislators in which the Republicans join with the Democrats to support health reform and the Democrats join with the Republicans to protect the state’s coal interests. There’s nothing, in other words, particularly obvious, natural, or inevitable about this kind of linkage. But American business has a very strong tendency toward forming a broad ideological alliance against all forms of regulation and public services. You might, for example, think that “real economy” firms would want a well-regulated financial system but business groups show no signs of anything other than hostility to efforts to better-regulate the main banks.

Baron Davis as Ancient Emperor

I was tweeting last night about how I wasn’t sure what ancient civilization Baron Davis’ beard reminded me of—Egypt, maybe? Or Sumer or Assyria? Dorsey Shaw stepped up to the plate with a composite image:

I love the internet. Also: health care reform!

Away We Go

Senators Lincoln and Landrieu have no both indicated that they’ll vote yes on the motion to proceed to the debate of the Senate health care bill. They’ve also both made it clear that they won’t vote for cloture on the bill unless the debate process leads to further concessions, especially on the public option.

That’s the day’s news. There’s hours more of debate to go, but we know what we need to know.

Making a Budget Commission Work

Evan Bayh has an idea for a budget commission: “our bipartisan panel would put all options on the table, including spending cuts and revenue raisers. Congress would then be compelled by law to debate the recommendations and take an up-or-down vote on the entire plan.”

I agree with Stan Collender that this isn’t going to work. As he observes, the reason BRAC works for base closures is that congress actually decides that it wants to close bases. What it’s outsourcing to the commission is the decision about which bases, so as to prevent parochial interests from totally dominating. For a budget commission to work, it, too, will need to make some decisions on its own. Reduce the deficit to what? With how much coming out of taxes and how much coming out of defense and how much coming out of domestic?

A commission could be a good way to formulate a sensible plan in terms of details. Put something more reasonable than across-the-board cuts or rate hikes within the context of a dysfunctional tax code. But a commission can’t actually just create consensus out of thin air.

Statement of Administration Policy

You’ll no doubt be surprised to learn that the official Statement of Administration Policy on the Senate health care bill says it’s a good bill. Read it for yourself below the fold:

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House Dems vs. Their Districs

A few days ago Nicholas Beaudrot pulled together some great data. He took each House Democrat’s DW-NOMINATE score and it compared it to the Cook PVI of his or her district. As a result, you can see who is left-wing relative to his district and who’s right-wing relative to his district. A quick visual summary:

One clear result of this inquiry is that the statewide races that Artur Davis and Kendrick Meeks are running are pulling both of them well to the right of their districts. You also see that Bobby Bright, though he has a very conservative voting record, is clearly pulling his district to the left. By contrast, Gregory Meeks, Laura Richardson, Jane Harman, and Dan Lipinski are all putting together voting records that are considerably more conservative than their districts.

Big Type = Long Bills

The whole thing where members of congress criticize bills for being too long is ridiculous. It just makes no sense whatsoever on its face. But to understand how dishonest it is, you need to actually look at a page in a bill. This, for example, is an actual-size reproduction of a portion of page 58 of the Senate health care bill:

The bill is long in part because it’s a complicated bill with lots of words in it. But part of the issue is that bills are printed up with large type and a lot of spacing. I’m not exactly sure why they’re formatted this way, but anyone who’s ever worked on the Hill—including Republican members of congress of course—knows this perfectly well.

Yesterday I heard Orrin Hatch say the health care bill is longer than War and Peace or some such. But it’s not. There are just fewer words on each page:

And recall that despite GOP protestations to the contrary, the House bill actually has fewer pages than War and Peace. More to the point, conservatives don’t like the House bill any more than they like the Senate bill even though it’s much shorter. In fact, they like it less—it’s more left-wing. The length of a bill just isn’t a reliable guide to its content. In fact, some of what makes the Senate bill longer is it’s more “moderate” nature—doing Exchanges on a state-by-state basis, for example, requires more words. Providing an opt-out for the public option requires more words.

The Real Banker Backlash

An interesting point from Gillian Tett who observes that the real populist backlash against the financial industry is likely to come when the bill genuinely comes due in the form of the need to massively reduce deficits in the 2011-13 period:

Perhaps that will occur when income taxes are hiked above 50 per cent. Or maybe when hospital budgets are cut, or military spending slashed. Either way, the potential list is long. While that might cause political instability (which, of course, would be bad for bond markets) it might trigger a renewed, vitriolic round of bank-bashing – particularly if voters in 2011 or 2012 know that 2010 was a year when banks paid out more, massive bonuses.

No wonder that some financial officials and politicians are frantically pleading with bankers behind closed doors to show more restraint in their current bonus round. “Don’t the bankers realise what could be coming?” I heard one senior western finance official tell a room full of bankers this week, as he argued – with passion and a sense of desperation – that it would be a mistake for banks to pay big bonuses.

But even if one firm’s management accepted the logic of this claim, there would be a collective action problem. People would want to go work at the firms that were still paying out the big bonuses. Under the circumstances “frantically pleading” couldn’t possibly work, you would need to actually force them to stop, perhaps through the kind of bonus windfall tax proposed by Martin Wolf.

The Treaties of Yore

US Capitol Building

This is far from his main point, but David Shorr’s observation that “it’s not clear that our political system is still able to ratify significant treaties” seems important to me. I mean, if you think it’s hard to get 60 Senators to agree to something, just try finding 67 willing to vote in favor of a major treaty.

In part it’s a shame that more people can’t have a more reasonable view on things like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But in part, this is a really weird quirk of our constitution grounded in an era, over 2000 years in the past, when both the U.S. political system and the role of treaties in the international arena was totally different. Consequently you get absurd scenarios in which the US is the only country that won’t join the UN Convention on the rights of the child.

Endgame

Decide what you came here for:

— Feminists should defend Twilight fans . . . or maybe not.

— Even the woeful Knicks won’t touch Allen Iverson but we’re still all assured he’s a great player.

— Senate bill’s employer responsibility provisions are an improvement over Finance Committee draft.

— Higher gas prices alone won’t make cars substantially cleaner.

— Performance parking can fund appealing local amenities as well as improving the availability of parking spots.

— Coal kills.

LoveLikeFire’s refusal to rename themselves “Love Like Fire” annoys me, but I like their songs. Here’s “Stand in My Shoes”.

If You Build It, Will They Maintain It?

In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.

But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.

Oooops!

Spencer Ackerman did an item this morning urging the appointment of General David Petraeus as DC Police Chief, observing that many of the ideas of counterinsurgency strategy are basically in line with a modern progressive “tough on crime, tough on the root causes of crime” approach. I don’t actually think it would make much sense to put a high-ranking general in charge of a police department, but the point the suggestion is meant to illustrate has, I think, a lot of merit. The basic ideas employed in something like a “clear, hold, build” approach to Baghdad are basically a super-charged version of what you would want to do to get serious about bringing improved public safety, economic opportunity, and public health to a bad neighborhood in Washington or Baltimore or Detroit.

Which sort of raises the question of whether it mightn’t make more sense to deploy these kind of resources in troubled parts of our own country. A lot of the things that seem really problematic for COIN—language problems, this issue with the locals actually being too poor to maintain the projects we kick off, etc.—wouldn’t apply in a domestic context.

Michael Jordan Displays Uncharacteristic Classiness, Humility

Michael Jordan seems to have been stung by the negative reaction to his horrifying Hall of Fame speech and decided to start showing some class and humility:

If the NBA were to retire Michael Jordan’s No. 23 leaguewide, the newly inducted Hall of Famer says there are several more players just as worthy of the distinction. LeBron James, who wears No. 23 for the Cleveland Cavaliers, said last week he would change jersey numbers next season in honor of Jordan, and said no other players should wear it, either. [...]

“Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Bill Russell all those guys should have their jerseys retired, too,” Jordan said. “I understand his gesture, but I am in the same group as those guys so I wouldn’t want to see my jersey retired unless you retire those guys. It is a compliment. I totally understand that. I appreciate LeBron for doing that and it is very thoughtful.”

Good for him.

The Three Percent Solution

Building on yesterday’s idea, borrowed from Brad DeLong, that the Fed could stimulate the economy by raising its long-term inflation target from two percent to three percent it’s worth noting that there are other arguments for thinking that this would be a good idea. First off, it’s worth noting that three percent inflation is still pretty low. There’s nothing magical about the two percent number, and a somewhat higher figure is still very much consistent with the basic idea that low inflation is good.

Second, a higher inflation rate would speed the process by which households climb out from over-indebtedness. Third, a higher inflation rate would ensure that in the future the Fed has more “running room” for conventional monetary policy before hitting the zero bound and getting into this madness. Fourth, a higher inflation rate would speed the process by which real wages and prices adjust to whatever real shocks the economy may or may not be suffering from.

This course of action seems to be anathema to the powers that be, but it seems strongly preferable to a prolonged period of ten percent unemployment and a possible series of trade wars and the like.

Needles in Haystacks

I think we might do a lot of good in the world, and even improve people’s personal decision-making, if we made everyone take a basic statistics class in high school. Certainly both the mammogram dispute and the post-Nidal Hasan resurgence of interest in “profiling” of Muslims is a reminder that most people don’t intuitively grasp the Bayes’ Law point about accurate tests for rare conditions. I’m finding it annoying to watch all these people with no relevant medical or scientific expertise sounding off about who should get checked for breast cancer, so let’s talk about terrorists instead.

Suppose I invent a magical device that can be pointed at a Muslim and say with 90% accuracy whether or not he’s an al-Qaeda operative. Well, if I start waving it around and it starts beeping on one guy, what should we conclude about him? A terrifyingly large number of people are going to say “there’s a ninety percent chance he’s with al-Qaeda! Let’s panic!” In fact, that’s not the case. There are a billion Muslims in the world. A test with 90 percent accuracy is going to mistakenly classify about 100 million of them as al-Qaeda operatives. And al-Qaeda actually has fewer than 10,000 people working for it. I’m going to get something like 10,000 false positives for every actual terrorist I find.

Meanwhile, applying the test to people is going to have severe consequences. The public doesn’t understand this correctly and is going to be put into a wholly unwarranted state of panic about the prevalence of terrorists. People will, of course, demand that those flagged by my machine be subjected to extra-heightened scrutiny. It’s easy to imagine lots of innocent people being mistakenly killed or subjected to discrimination or shunning. And that sense of beseigement and unfair treatment would ultimately heighten tensions between the world’s Muslims and the West, while wasting massive quantities of law enforcement resources chasing basically worthless leads.

What Leverage Does Chinese Ownership of US Assets Give Them?

I agree with Stephen Walt’s overall point that part of what we’re seeing on Barack Obama’s Asia trip is that the Bush administration’s squandering of American national power has increased China’s status vis-a-vis the United States. That said, there’s a particular thread in his comments that you hear a lot and that I don’t really understand:

No president is going to be able to lay down the law on human rights, exchange rates, or sanctions on Iran when China owns over a trillion dollars in U.S. assets, when the U.S. economy is on life support, and when the American military Is mired in two losing wars. Until we get our house in order over here, nobody should expect China to be especially responsive to our wishes or expect its leaders to view the “American model” as especially appealing.

My question is, in the specific case of the US-China currency dispute what leverage does Chinese ownership of US assets give them? If we annoy them too much about our desire to see their currency appreciate, they might sell their dollar-denominated assets thus . . . causing their currency to appreciate? It doesn’t add up. China isn’t buying that stuff as a favor to us that they can then revoke. They’re buying it as an integral element of their exchange rate policy.

The real question about this is whether American officials really want them to stop. They say they do. But while dollar depreciation would be good for the American labor market, and good for the long-term balance of the world economy, it could make the deficit situation more urgent.

Tea Party: The Documentary Film

It’s a little bit difficult to believe, but this is not a parody. It’s an actual preview for an actual movie about the tea party movement:

Find out more here.

Evaluating the North American Union

David Corn describes the premise of a new online game:

It’s January 2011. The GOP is about to assume control of both houses of Congress—having been voted in by a public deeply suspicious of Democrats after President Barack Obama conducted clandestine talks with President Felipe Calderon of Mexico and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada. But two days before the new conservative majority is to be sworn in, Obama announces that this Congress will not be seated, that the United States (a creation of “racists and warmongers”) will be replaced by a North American Union, that the US Constitution will be dissolved, and that private ownership of firearms will be outlawed (as part of a United Nations treaty banning firearms globally). In response, millions rise up, and the Revolution begins.

Interestingly, the United States Constitution itself (indubitably the creation of racists, though not necessarily warmongers) was formed through just this sort of backroom deal-making among elites determined to ignore the existing legal procedures laid out in the Articles of Confederation. Which is just to say that crazier things have happened.

Talk of a North American Union or a NAFTA Superhighway has mostly been used as a launching point for sociological speculations but I think it’s an idea worth taking seriously. Insofar as the concept has any real origins, it seems to be in a 1999 report by the Frasier Institute, which is a free market Canadian think tank, called “The Case for the Amero: The Economics and Politics of a North American Monetary Union “. To be a bit flip about it, the author seemed upset that Canada didn’t undergo a Reagan/Thatcher-style assault on trade unions in the 1980s and believed it had escaped this fate by devaluing its currency to maintain labor market competitiveness. Under a monetary union, this would be impossible and Canadian unions could be crushed. Taking the longer view, it now simply appears to not be the case that the Canadian dollar is in some consistent downward trend relative to the dollar.

So the issue this was meant to address actually looks like a bit of a non-issue. But the case for US-Canadian political union is pretty clear. As things stand, Canadian citizens are intensely impacted by decisions taken in Washington but have no real ability to influence them. Political union would give residents of Vancouver and Toronto an opportunity to have a say in decisions that are important to their lives. What’s more, the politics of AmeriCan would be more sensible than current US politics. There’d be a lot of microeconomic efficiency gains, and bringing America’s higher per capita income together with Canada’s vast natural resources could be beneficial for everyone.

Monetary union with Mexico, by contrast, seems like a bad idea—the economies are too different and too out of sync. But of course the European Union didn’t begin its political integration with monetary integration. And the case for deeper political ties between Mexico and the US/Canada seems fairly compelling.

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The Punch Europe Needs

Quentin Peel’s analysis of the new EU jobs contains a lot of interesting background, but I’m not sure that the lede is right:

The appointment of Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium’s prime minister, as president of the European Council and Lady Ashton of the UK as European Union “high representative” for foreign affairs is certain to be seen by many as a demonstration of Europe’s inability to punch its weight on the global stage.

Neither is a big political figure with an international reputation. Both are classic consensus-building figures, unthreatening to national European leaders, and unlikely to steal the limelight from their rivals.

I think the idea that the EU could have become a major player on the world stage simply by picking a famous person to be President of the European Council was always a mirage based on fuzzy thinking. If the EU were a country, it would be a very important country. It would have the largest economy in the world, a medium-sized nuclear arsenal, and a military that though considerably smaller than America’s does have some ability to project power on a global basis. Under the circumstances, even the most obscure person in the world would become an important player once he ascended to the top leadership post. But the EU isn’t a country, so it a fortiori isn’t an important country.

The weight-punching issue, viewed in this light, isn’t an issue of personalities it’s an issue of institutions. To punch its weight, Europe needs institutions that facilitate collective decision-making that can put its weight into place. This is why, per Annie Lowrey, the foreign policy job “will end up being the vastly more influential one — Ashton will control thousands of civil servants and a large budget.” Jean-Claude Trichet is one of the most important people on the planet, not because he’s famous, but because the European Central Bank has real responsibilities and the power to do things. Ashton will have some real authority, and that will make her important. Van Rompuy, meanwhile, will be able to wield some influence on the world stage if-and-only-if he’s able to forge a consensus of EU national leaders to back some course of action or another. Under the circumstances, a consensus-builder figure isn’t an alternative to a strong leader—the only way the office he’s picked for can possibly be strong is through consensus-building.

McCain Vulnerable to Challenge from the Right

Rasmussen Reports poll reveals John McCain to be pretty vulnerable to a potential primary challenge:

Senator John McCain’s future in the U.S. Senate may be a little less assured than previously thought.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely 2010 Republican Primary voters in Arizona finds the longtime incumbent in a virtual tie with potential challenger J.D. Hayworth. McCain earns 45% of the vote, while Hayworth picks up 43%.

This seems like pretty much terrible news for the world. The most likely path between Point A and Senate passage of a reasonable climate bill is for McCain to rediscover his interest in the issue. But that’s not the sort of thing a Senator worried about a right-wing primary challenge is likely to do. It would be different if, say, Janet Napolitano were mounting a strong challenge for the seat, but instead Democrats have no major contender in the field.

Public Mostly Holds Republicans Responsible for Recession, But Democrats Now Catching More Blame

One reason that Barack Obama has stayed in pretty good political shape despite a terrible economic situation is that the public has consistently recalled that this recession began under George W Bush and reached its highest point of crisis under Bush. But as horrible labor market conditions persist, it’s natural that Democrats are attracting more and more ire:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Friday morning indicates that 38 percent of the public blames Republicans for the country’s current economic problems. In May, 53 percent blamed the GOP. According to the poll, 27 percent now blame the Democrats for the recession, up 6 points from May, and 27 percent now say both parties are responsible.

I’ll just note that this highlights one important respect in which the filibuster undermines democratic accountability. It’s a good thing for the public to hold Democrats responsible for results even if the problems the Democrats are dealing with began under GOP rule. That instinct creates appropriate incentives for incumbent politicians to focus on solving problems rather than on allocating blame. But giving defeated electoral minorities veto power over large elements of national policy tends to undermine this dynamic. What’s wanted is an opportunity for the Obama administration to take its best shot at fixing the economy, followed by an “accountability moment” in which failure is decisively punished. Instead, especially if the GOP picks up two or three Senate seats in 2010, we’re likely to get a muddle that refocuses politics on blame-shifting efforts.

Public Has Crazy Opinions About the Budget Deficit

Steve Benen observes that the other thing about the CNN poll referenced below is that it shows that the public has absolutely insane ideas about balancing the budget. In particular, 67 percent of voters claim to believe that “the government should balance the budget even when the country is in a recession and is at war.” Take a look at the Congressional Budget Office’s latest report on the budget situation and consider what balancing the FY 2009 budget would entail:

As a first cut, we could return spending to its FY 2008 level (approximately at the historical average, and where we under the right-wing Bush administration) by entirely eliminating Social Security. Alternatively, we could keep Social Security as is, and entirely eliminate Medicare and Medicaid. Having done that, we would still need about $800 billion in additional tax increases. That’d be a tax hike of about twenty times the annual impact of the tax increases included in the health reform bill.

You could get this, maybe, by imposing a 10 percent Value Added Tax. But anyone who thinks that balancing the budget via a 10 percent VAT and the elimination of Social Security payments would be a popular agenda is certifiably insane. But there’s no other permutation of budget balancing that makes any more sense. For example, suppose you wanted to balance the budget entirely on the spending side. Well, the total 2009 deficit is $1.587 trillion. If we entirely eliminated discretionary spending—no electricity in the White House, no military, no FBI, no national parks, no nothing—we’d still have a $346 billion deficit.

People think they think they want a balanced budget even in a severe recession, but that’s because they obviously have no idea what balancing the FY 2009 budget would entail.

How Vindicated is Tim Geithner?

David Brooks has a good column today arguing that Timothy Geithner’s approach to the financial crisis has been vindicated and that actually one of the most roundly criticized aspects of the Obama administration’s approach has worked out well.

He makes strong points, but I would have tempered this a bit. Brooks writes that it “now seems clear that nationalization would have been an unnecessary mistake — potentially expensive and dangerously disruptive.” But he also notes:

In the next few months, Geithner will be confronted with a cross-cutting set of pressures. First, the need to reduce the deficits, which is uppermost on his mind. Second, the rising populism in Congress, which has to be battled sometimes and appeased sometimes by an administration that hopes to get things passed. Third, intense public cynicism about government, which means that every debate is washed in negativity.

Most important, there’s the jobs situation. If job growth returns, that will be a sign that the recovery is normal and Geithner and the administration can return to a more moderate path. If employment does not rebound or the economy double dips, that will be a sign of systemic problems. Geithner and his colleagues will probably adopt a much more activist posture and have to throw their lot in with the left.

I think these challenges underscore the fact that even though Geithner’s approach worked a lot better than his critics were inclined to say*, they also haven’t worked all that well. The unemployment rate is much better than people feared it would have been without a financial rescue, but it remains unacceptably high. And the problematic political situation seems to me to be largely a direct result of the government’s failure to capture a larger share of the financial upside associated with post-TARP large financial services firms. The way the Chrysler/GM bailouts were structured, if either firms becomes wildly successful in the future, the US taxpayer will get a very handsome payout. But the services rendered to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and the rest were not similarly oriented. The TARP money was “paid back” but the taxpayer hasn’t gotten anything resembling a fair share of the upside. This has created a situation in which it’s very difficult for the government to take further steps in really any direction.

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Do The People Need to Know the Truth?

Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier’s complaints about the health care bill seem oddly vague to me and disconnected from any real knowledge of the provisions of the bill. But at the very end he makes some reasonable points:

So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

I’ll count myself as among those who quietly understands that something more dramatic than what’s in these bills is ultimately needed. And it definitely sounds good to say that we shouldn’t take these first steps without first having a great national deliberation about the bigger changes to come. But I also think that’s a pretty naive way to look at it. The fact of the matter is that the long-term fiscal outlook is dire:

Dealing with this will be hard. If the bill Harry Reid unveiled yesterday is signed into law, it will be easier. It will be easier in part because the bill directly tackles the fiscal problem and reduces the deficit. And it will be easier in part because senators and members of congress who are considering additional ideas to improve the situation will have a recent precedent available of legislative success. If the bill is defeated, tackling the problem gets harder. It doesn’t open the door to a broader national conversation in which citizens lose their bias toward the status quo or interest groups lose their desire to fight for the biggest possible slice of pie.

It would be nice if health reform did more to control costs and reform the delivery system than this bill does. But it does something to control costs and it does something to reform the delivery system. And it improves access for millions of people in need. To hold that latter factor hostage to a pie-in-the-sky belief that if the whole thing goes down in flames more radical change will somehow become possible seems to me to exhibit very strange political judgment.

Change in Debt-to-GDP Ratio

Brad DeLong offers this chart:

The reason to be concerned about the long-term deficit is that the basic underlying concept of Medicare—the government will pay for health care for old people—implies a gigantic long-term fiscal shortfall. There’s no reason to be concerned about the short-term deficit. As for the medium-term, the main reason to worry is that the odds are pretty good that a Republican President will be inaugurated in 2013 or 2017 and embark on a program of deficit-inducing tax cuts and defense spending hikes. That, at any rate, is the historical pattern.

Endgame

Did you really change your mind?

— Climate change activism foiled by belief-desire psychology?

— The constitutional procedure for implementing preventive detention.

— The more Democrats talk about fixing health care the bigger the minority calling the status quo “excellent” grows.

— I keep meaning to link to this post.

— Prison vs college in California.

— A Lou Dobbs presidential run would be hilarious.

— I think Bill Gross doesn’t know what the Maginot Line is, among other things.

— Turkey is still bad.

— Belgian PM ascending to EU job is bad for Belgium.

There was some revisionism on Twitter earlier today trying to get me to raise my estimation of The Hot Rock which, while good, I think is relatively weak for a Sleater-Kinney album. “Burn, Don’t Freeze”, however, is absolutely excellent.