Cheap Shot

Ann Althouse:

Drunk, stoned, old, stupid... you know, this may be why I enjoy listening to Rush Limbaugh.

She doesn't mean what she seems to mean, but who could pass up that quote? I'm only human.

A Suggestion

If I were the advice-giving sort, which I usually am not, I'd advise Ta-Nehisi Coates to start explaining who the Black Panthers were. The right is conflating them with the hate group the New Black Panthers, and his father's reputation will be trashed if everyone lets them get away with this.

Shut Up!

Megan McArdle has found an internet critic, nay, a venomous stalker, and is amused and puzzled.

Tee-hee! http://bit.ly/bBXe5g
about 10 hours ago via TweetDeck

The hee! references a post by a male who appears to spend most of his time calculating how little he can spend on a woman and still get to have sex with her. His view of women as a walking, whining, brainless vagina waiting to be gifted with his member will end up being its own reward, but his venom makes McArdle think.

@m_beauchamp At some point there's ironic tension in blogging . . . folks who pour whole life into perfecting pursuit of people they despise
6 minutes ago via TweetDeck

Ironic tension is the tension created by the use of irony--the viewers know something the writer (or character) does not. Evidently McArdle satisfies the inner unease created by criticism by telling herself that she knows the truth and her critics do not. Sadly, the facts do not back her up, but in this particular case she might have a point. The author of the criticism, Chateau, assumes McArdle is a ball-busting feminist out to bag a man any way she can. Little does he know that McArdle sees herself as an exclusive club which few are allowed to enter.

But McArdle's confusion about the motives of her critics is very interesting. She utterly ignores the fact that she is a paid advocate for global corporations who is pretending to be a journalist. It's possible that she's too stupid to know she is being used, but her stupidity is usually deliberate. She and the rest of her sorry band of bankster and oil company boosters think that they should be left alone to pass on their propaganda in peace and collect their hefty paychecks, which they will spend in the pursuit of an upper-class lifestyle they can't afford. Any consequences of their actions, any suffering they cause or disaster they help someone get away with, is irrelevant. Why can't those haters just leave them alone? They're not doing anything wrong. They're noble truth-tellers and arbitrators of public wisdom. They should be praised and accepted, and instead they are fact-checked and criticized. What the hell is wrong with the world?

Chateau is worthy of a post in himself, but we are not in the mood for the bile of the self-pitying, scheming, grasping male harridan out for all he can get, who views women as self-pitying scheming, grasping harridans out for all they can get. Our feminism comes from the knowledge that women are just as smart and stupid, venal and noble, adventurous and home-loving, and creative and destructive as men.

ADDED: Glenn Greenwald:

These [government officials] are individuals who destroyed the lives of countless innocent people with gruesome and lawless "policies." Not only did they never suffer for it, they have been richly rewarded with wealth and life-long job security. And still, the only tragedy they see from everything that happened is their own trivial "suffering," i.e., the fact that they're criticized in some quarters for what they did. The term "sociopathic self-absorption" should have a huge picture of them next to it in the dictionary.

The same thing goes for the "journalists" that aid and abet them.

Problem Solved

Before the unholy decade of the 1960s, students dressed in formal wear like little ladies and gentlemen and always paid attention to their lessons.

Townhall and talk radio dolt Dennis Prager has some new ideas for schools. If he had his way----.

If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial, or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity-, race-, and non-American-nationality-based celebrations.

Woops, there goes Christian celebrations like Christmas and Easter holidays.

First, this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity. I could not care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow, or white. I could not care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian, or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships.

There goes Columbus Day and Thanksgiving.

I will not authorize clubs that divide students based on any identities. This includes race, language, religion, sexual orientation, or whatever else may become in vogue in a society divided by political correctness.

There go all the foreign language clubs. My Spanish club's annual trip to La Hacienda? Verboten!

Your clubs will be based on interests and passions, not blood, ethnic, racial, or other physically defined ties. Those clubs just cultivate narcissism — an unhealthy preoccupation with the self — while the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself. So we will have clubs that transport you to the wonders and glories of art, music, astronomy, languages you do not already speak, carpentry, and more.

But you got rid of the foreign language clubs. Does this mean that only non-Hispanics can have a Spanish club? And isn't art and music kind of gay? You don't want gay kids getting together, do you Dennis? And astronomy--isn't that kind of atheistic? Carpentry? Tools are expensive; who's going to pay for that? Not us conservatives. Just readin', writin', and 'rithmitic for us.

Third, because I regard learning as a sacred endeavor, everything in this school will reflect learning’s elevated status. This means, among other things, that you and your teachers will dress accordingly. Many people in our society dress more formally for a meal at a nice restaurant than they do for church or school. These people have their priorities backwards. Therefore, there will be a formal dress code at this school.

Most schools have dress codes. Many public schools require uniforms. But hey, if Prager thinks he can force the parents of his students to dress them in suits and ties or dresses and pantyhose, he can go for it.

Fourth, no obscene language will be tolerated anywhere on this school’s property — whether in class, in the hallways, or at athletic events. If you can’t speak without using the F-word, you can’t speak. By obscene language I mean the words banned by the Federal Communications Commission plus epithets such as the N-word, even when used by one black student to address another, or “bitch,” even when addressed by a girl to a girlfriend. It is my intent that by the time you leave this school, you will be among the few of your age to distinguish instinctively between the elevated and the degraded, the holy and the obscene.

Torture--hunky-dory. The f-word--obscene and profane. Let's keep our priorities straight.

Prager's mythical school sounds like it would be a sure-fire success. Once you make sure your students all look and sound like a 1950s picture book, every other problem melts away. But at least Prager isn't trying to get rid of public schools altogether, like all the gullible people being paid by major corporations to eliminate the corporations' property taxes. Those conservatives would be perfectly happy paying five grand or more per child per year to educate their kids, and pay for private police to protect them from the bored, angry, uneducated and unemployed masses that they can't wait to unleash upon the world.

Not If He Were The Last Man On Earth

For Jonah Goldberg, every natural disaster brings the faint, fond hope that somehow, in the death, destruction, chaos and suffering of an utter breakdown of society it will be possible for him to get laid, preferably by a hot college student.

So I keep hearing that these efforts to capture, clean and release oiled wildlife are counterproductive. Most eventually die from the stress of the oil and, apparently just as stressful, the dishwashing soap baths. In one of those weird ironies of nature, being surrounded by a bunch of soapy-sponge-wielding attractive University of Alabama female zoology students in wet t-shirts is an excellent plot device for a late nigh cinemax movie when the subject "victim" getting a bath is a sensitive-yet-jocular ski instructor, but it's terrifying if you're a brown pelican.

Somehow the hotties of Co-Ed Confidential never seem to dip from the eager and virginal Young Republican pool of candidates. And all of the little libertarians and conservatives who grew up reading Robert Heinlein and can't wait for the opportunity to mate with charming and willing young co-eds when the world ends wait in vain for the end of civilization, when they might finally have a chance with a girl of their dreams.

Watch Out, CIA

The Agonist points out a deeply improbably article from China.

Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents are training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops, according to a recent report by a British-based media agency.

Reporters from the media agency spotted and took photos of a few "monkey soldiers" holding AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The report and photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world.

According to the report, American military experts call them "monkey terrorists."

The rest of it is just as good. There are no reports yet on whether the monkeys are working for the government or are XE contractors, or if Sean Hannity is throwing a fund-raiser to send bananas to the troops.

Coda

Remember Megan McArdle's assertion that Americans can't have universal health care because high American drug prices subsidize innovation for the world? It was hard to forget because she repeated that mantra for months. When she was asked for the supporting data, she tap-danced and waffled. Finally she acknowledged that she had no evidence, although she later tried to pretend both that she was right because she was confused when she gave that admission and that her "facts" came from sources who lied to her.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism reports:

A new and interesting line of attack has been opened against Big Pharma’s defense of its high US prices and its ongoing attacks on Europe and other countries that negotiate discounts. US drugmakers have contended that the rest of the world is effectively free-riding on US research, and that its inability to charge higher prices outside the US limits funding of R&D (ahem, have we forgotten the fact that most really big ailments already have treatments of some sort, making it much less likely that anyone will find a new blockbuster drug?).

But a more granular look at drug pricing within the US shows that drugmakers offer enough discounts here to undermine their attacks on non-US health schemes. And the foreign drug regimes at least assure that everyone in the population is on the same footing, while here, the highest prices fall on those either outside health care plans or in ones without favorable drug pricing, so the burden of higher prices falls disproportionately on lower income people.

Smith quotes the Financial Times, which calls the revelation "an embarrassment for the industry, and notably PhRMA, its powerful Washington, DC-based trade body. In the past PhRMA has argued that Europe’s ill-conceived public policies, including price controls and sluggish regulatory decision-making, have chilled innovation and raised doubts among private investors who help to underwrite research."

McArdle merely parroted whatever Big Pharma told her. They told her what to say, she wrote it down and printed it, and her job was done, except for all the funny posts defending the indefensible. She's a perfect example of the modern journalist, bought and paid for by corporations and without the slightest bit of awareness that they are merely stooges in a giant confidence game.

Big Pharma came out with a study of their own, of course, this one saying that drug price cuts in Europe will harm innovation because there will be less profit for drug corporations. This issue has been discuss a lot as well, since such studies ignore the role of government in drug innovation, as well as how much innovation actually goes on in drug corporations.

I wonder which study McArdle will address, if any. If I were her I'd just let the matter quietly die, but discretion has never been a McArdle virtue--thank goodness.

Derangement Syndrome

Kathryn Jean Lopez is verklempt.

the cowardly president http://ow.ly/28Sw2
11 minutes ago via HootSuite

The link leads to a post about Obama and a recess appointment. Lopez does not mention that Bush made 171 recess appointments [pdf] because she doesn't care. When you are a mindless sycophant, anything goes.

Job Hunt

Posting will be light today and tomorrow while I continue to look for work. If you would like to hire someone who is trustworthy, dependable, likes to work hard, and has a Texas teaching certificate, let me know. In the mean time, I will be trying to write cover letters that obscure the fact that I have worked from home doing teaching, writing, and office work for no pay for fifteen years.

The Rhyme Of The Not-So-Ancient Blogger

Megan McArdle links to a post written by Julian "insufferably pretentious" Sanchez mocking someone who tweeted through an opera performance. This is the same man that tweeted through the McArdle/Suderman wedding, along with the rest of the party. Then they wrote posts about how special it was to twitter the wedding and share it with friends.

If it's okay to tweet through a wedding reception, surely it's okay to tweet through the opera. Unless you just want to call someone a dick to emphasize your aesthetic purity.

Look, fussing with your phone constantly—even on “minimum brightness”—is kind of a dick move at any performance, but it’s borderline sacrilegious when it comes to Wagner, whose genius was in creating such an absolutely immersive experience through the fusion of music and drama. Which makes little intrusions from your neighbors that break the spell about a thousand times more grating.

Whereas twittering during a wedding reception is just fine.

But maybe we are wrong, and it was a blessing to have the DC blogging world hunched over their tiny electronics instead of regaling the wedding guests with monologues about how The Fountainhead changed their lives, or describing the time they kicked ass in Bloggingheads.

Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner cloud from here.

Screw You

This is a tool. It is specially made to be attractive to those who are not familiar with tools. It is used to screw things.(from)

Megan McArdle tells us that Ireland isn't so bad off after all, no matter how bad its economy seems.

Today's New York Times article on the Irish economy makes for depressing reading. Despite swift moves for wage cuts and other austerity measures (backed by the unions, no less), the deficit is almost 15% of GDP, and the spread between Irish and German debt is about 300 basis points. Unemployment is high, and long-term unemployment makes up a significant portion of the problem.

Yes, Ireland is in very bad financial shape.

Ireland, in truth, has been something like a region of the US economy that had privileged access to European Union markets. In the 1990s, with help from a friendly White House deeply involved in the Northern ‘peace process’, we got rich by selling Intel chips, Dell laptops and Viagra tablets to our EU partners, while still benefitting from EU funds to improve our infrastructure. When that boom levelled out after 2001 we could still thrive on the new sources of cheap labour that the EU’s expansion to the east has offered. Dublin parishes offer masses in Polish; fishy Baltic delicacies hide behind obscure shopfronts; in some pubs vodka is more popular than Guinness. But much of the growth in this latter period, and much of the employment for our eastern friends, was fuelled by a mad property bubble, which saw government, developers and banks collude in a conspiracy that clearly bordered on criminal, and occasionally seems to have crossed the border, in order to build houses, apartments and offices that may never be occupied. Financial “innovation” also played its part: Dublin, with its low and lax approaches to taxation and regulation, became home, at least nominally to nearly a third of the world’s hedge funds.

Fortunes were made, to be sure: it was not unusual to see a house increase by five-fold in price in the space of seven or eight years. But now that the bubble has burst, the most criminal of the banks--Anglo-Irish Bank, which became a Ponzi-like scheme for a golden circle of developers who benefited from all sorts of state patronage and tax breaks--has become property of the State, and billions of public euro have been poured into the larger banks to keep them afloat. This week we learned that Anglo-Irish made “loans” totalling 300 million euro ($380 million) to its friends last year in return for the recipients buying shares in the bank to prop up its share-price. It’s not exactly a conspiracy that will restore faith in the cleverness of our ruling elites, since the share-price nonetheless slid quickly into oblivion. But hey, it wasn’t exactly risky: no one is going to being chased for the money, and now we all own the bank.

Tax breaks for major corporations and lax banking regulations. A giant housing bubble. And profits that went to global corporations, contributing to giant income inequality. Doesn't that sound familiar.

The growing success of Ireland's economy encouraged entrepreneurship and risk-taking, qualities that had been dormant during poor economic periods. However, whilst some semblance of a culture of entrepreneurship exists, foreign-owned companies account for 93% of Ireland's exports.

In other words, libertarian heaven.


McArdle has a dilemma. She can accept the facts-a bloated financial industry, low corporate taxes and tax cuts, and cheap credit all lead to disaster. Or she can reject the facts for a more congenial reality.

Well, for starters, we don't know that the results have been pretty horrific.

It's rejection for the win!

What we know is that financial crises are pretty horrific, and that Ireland, for a number of reasons, was especially vulnerable to crisis. (Small economy, no independent monetary policy, highly export dependent . . . the list goes on).

Saying that "the results have been horrific" implies that we know the alternative, in the form of even higher debt, would not have been even worse. That is certainly the dominant macroeconomic theory, but that theory hardly rises to the second law of thermodynamics.

This argument is just like her argument for the American banks. We had to bail them out or the entire economy would collapse. We know how that worked out. We bailed them out, they kept the money, and the entire economy collapsed. And we became a lot poorer, while the banksters became a lot richer.

I am rather reminded of Ken Rogoff's infamous Open Letter to Joseph Stiglitz, when Stiglitz wondered why everyone had all this wrongheaded insistence on austerity:[snipped quote]. Rogoff is quoted in the article, but the author rather glosses his point: If Ireland hadn't done the austerity budget, it might now be more like Greece--in danger of default without massive intervention from the rest of the European Union. Intervention that might well not be forthcoming, if it became clear that too many countries were going to require it.

So the solution for the financial sector's rape and pillage is for the worker to suffer "austerity," the new word for poverty. How's that working out for Ireland?

Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations.

“When our public finance situation blew wide open, the dominant consideration was ensuring that there was international investor confidence in Ireland so we could continue to borrow,” said Alan Barrett, chief economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute of Ireland. “A lot of the argument was, ‘Let’s get this over with quickly.’ ”

Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized. Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession.

Joblessness in this country of 4.5 million is above 13 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed — those out of work for a year or more — have more than doubled, to 5.3 percent.

Now, the Irish are being warned of more pain to come.

“The facts are that there is no easy way to cut deficits,” Prime Minister Brian Cowen said in an interview. “Those who claim there’s an easier way or a soft option — that’s not the real world.”

Despite its strenuous efforts, Ireland has been thrust into the same ignominious category as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. It now pays a hefty three percentage points more than Germany on its benchmark bonds, in part because investors fear that the austerity program, by retarding growth and so far failing to reduce borrowing, will make it harder for Dublin to pay its bills rather than easier.

Other European nations, including Britain and Germany, are following Ireland’s lead, arguing that the only way to restore growth is to convince investors and their own people that government borrowing will shrink.

In the wake of austerity's lack of success, McArdle advocates---austerity! That's why she's paid the big bucks; she's a Big Thinker.

Austerity is an expensive form of insurance against a true fiscal crisis. And though it doesn't necessarily seem like it when you're not having one, fiscal crises are much, much worse than austerity budgets. Fiscal crisis means that rather than unpleasant cuts, you have sudden, unmanageable collapses in things like public pension plans. The resulting suffering is not unpleasant; it is disastrous.

Because if you don't cut spending to make up for cutting taxes and regulations, you know what will happen?

A year or two ago, I'm sure some corporate executive at BP was asking why the company would consider installing expensive remote control valves on its offshore rigs, when this sort of spill is extremely rare, and the fail-safe might not even work. One could even argue that given the economic cost of higher gasoline prices, and the rarity of these spills, BP made a good bet. We might well . . . if the spill hadn't happened.

But once it has, we're damn sure that we wanted them to be a lot more careful, no matter what the cost.

That's right! After your policies create a disaster, you can use that disaster to warn people from changing your policies! Because a disaster might happen!

Just as even before the spill, some environmentalists were sure they wanted the added protection at whatever cost, some fiscal hawks are sure they want the added protection from fiscal breakdown. Given that the odds of fiscal crisis are less than 100%, this is certainly arguable. But unless you know how much less than 100% they are, it's not exactly crazy to try to head it off by spending less than the bond markets are willing to let us.

People are tired and worried. We've absorbed as much bad news as we can take and we know we're going to be hit with more. We're hunkered down, shoulders hunched, waiting for the blow to land.

And McArdle is right there, whispering in our ear, telling us that we deserve to be hurt, we deserve to suffer, we deserve to be poorer.

How else will the banking industry recover?

Shorter Megan McArdle

Less Geopolitical Megan: Why would Russia want to find out the plans of the most powerful nation on earth, which is currently running military operations in scores of countries and must have an eye on Russia's oil and other resources?*

*Note: All facts have been added and are not the contribution of Ms. McArdle.

Less Populist Megan

Shorter Megan McArdle, in her own words:

Felix and others have offered plenty of evidence that doing principal-reduction mortgage mods would be good for borrowers. But I've never seen much analysis showing that they'd actually be good for the lenders.

Priorities, people.

Twilight Of The Virgins

What the hell is Kathryn Jean Lopez reading?

abstinence doesn't have to be WEIRD. i feel like girls (&guys) obsessed with twilight need to know that.
about 5 hours ago via web

Lie down with Mormon fantasy writers, wake up with Bella, a grossly passive young woman of 18 who has no dreams, no desires, no interests and no plans but to marry her boyfriend, who speaks and acts exactly like a bad imitation of Heathcliff. A Heathcliff, moreover, who sneaks into her bedroom at night to watch her, fights over her obsessively, and makes all her decisions for her.

Meyer, a Mormon, acknowledges that her faith has influenced her work. In particular, she says that her characters "tend to think more about where they came from, and where they are going, than might be typical."[43] Meyer also steers her work from subjects such as sex, despite the romantic nature of the novels. Meyer says that she does not consciously intend her novels to be Mormon-influenced, or to promote the virtues of sexual abstinence and spiritual purity, but admits that her writing is shaped by her values, saying, "I don't think my books are going to be really graphic or dark, because of who I am. There's always going to be a lot of light in my stories."

The Mormon church teaches that the only role in life for women is wife and mother, and supporter of her husband. A Mormon workbook for girls states:

President Kimball cautioned, “Do not … make the mistake of being drawn off into secondary tasks which will cause the neglect of your eternal assignments such as giving birth to and rearing the spirit children of our Father in Heaven” (Ensign, Nov. 1979, pp. 102–3).

[Teachers should] Point out that if we have the proper attitude toward our role as wife and helpmate, we too can have great influence for good in the lives of our future husbands, regardless of their station in life. We should never underestimate how important women are as wives.

President Spencer W. Kimball has given us this encouragement:

“To be a righteous woman is a glorious thing in any age. To be a righteous woman during the winding up scenes on this earth, before the second coming of our Savior, is an especially noble calling. The righteous woman’s strength and influence today can be tenfold what it might be in more tranquil times. She has been placed here to help to enrich, to protect, and to guard the home—which is society’s basic and most noble institution” (Ensign, Nov. 1978, p. 103).

Lopez should embrace the weirdness of the Twilight fans and the books' depiction of obsessive love, abstinence, dominance and submission; she has the same beliefs about women's roles in society. The only difference is the thin Catholic veneer that makes such beliefs acceptable to The Littlest Missionary. Slap a crucifix on Bella and K-Lo would be stocking up on Twilight merchandise just like every other female who is emotionally thirteen years old.*

*No offense to actual 13-year-olds, who are sometimes very shrewd and could probably think rings around our K-Lo.

The Poor Man's MoDo

If Kathleen Parker is hoping to be a right-leaning Maureen Dowd, she's going to have to do a lot better than this.

If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

Phew. That was fun. Now, if you'll just keep those hatchets holstered and hear me out.

That was Parker's first mistake. Dowd just calls him a girl and damns the consequences, which are nil.

No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie president.

Really?

Barack Obama may be our first woman president.
he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit
It is that his approach is feminine in a normative sense
he's not exactly causing anxiety in Alpha-maledom
Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse? [of acting like a man]
Obama displays many tropes of femaleness
I don't think that doing things a woman's way is evidence of deficiency but
Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman

So Parker is a liar as well as a provocateur.

The BP oil crisis has offered a textbook case of how Obama's rhetorical style has impeded his effectiveness. The president may not have had the ability to "plug the damn hole," as he put it in one of his manlier outbursts. No one expected him to don his wetsuit and dive into the gulf, but he did have the authority to intervene immediately and he didn't.

If he couldn't plug the hole, who would he turn to to plug the hole? The people who made the hole and were trying to plug it? Parker knows her readers will not follow her logic to its conclusion, so she can say anything she wants.

Instead, he deferred to BP, weighing, considering, even delivering jokes to the White House Correspondents' Association dinner when he should have been on Air Force One to the Louisiana coast.

[...]

Granted, the century is young -- and it shouldn't surprise anyone that Obama's rhetoric would simmer next to George W. Bush's boil. But passivity in a leader is not a reassuring posture.

Comparing Obama to Bush is not a winning tactic, as Bush passively ignored the "Bin Laden Trying To Hijack Airplanes And Kill Us" memo and passively let thousands of our people die before actively letting thousands more die in half-assed invasions.

What evidence does Parker offer to support her Obama-is-a-girly-man thesis, besides her gut? Parker states that men and women "communicate differently," and offers as proof an article on a study that shows men might have a better sense of direction than women because of biological factors. [The shape of the inner ear.] The article does not support Parker's thesis in any way.

Her second bit of evidence is the use of passive voice in an Obama speech. Parker assumes that women are passive and men are active, and therefore the use of the passive voice is feminine. Fortunately we do not have to accept Parker's sexist beliefs, and therefore her bit of "evidence" is useless. Her other bit of evidence, she freely admits, conflicts with actual data.

Campbell's research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy -- clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

Parker chooses to reject any conflicting studies because she prefers her own version, in which everyone agrees with her.

I'm not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell's argument that "nothing prevents" men from appropriating women's style without negative consequences.

Indeed, negative reaction to Obama's speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

Tucked away in the general stupidity are a few pro-Sarah Palin points.

Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception).

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, "like a man."

And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman's turn.

Poor Parker can't even openly support her fav because nobody in her tribal sub-section has any respect for Palin and now that Parker has made it to the Show, she's not about to jeopardize her status. She's a poor man's MoDo, with weak arguments, irrelevant data, knee-jerk conservative leanings, and neither MoDo's wit nor cojones. But she seems to be good enough for the Washington Post, so no doubt we can look forwards to many, many more columns calling Obama a whiny-assed weak bitch.

The Happiest Billionaires

I've said that Chris Hayes is authoritarian. Since then I've tried to be aware of his work, in case I was unfair. Then I read this.

The only way to wake the American elite establishment out of its complacency about the slow motion disaster of the great recession is for the people getting hammered by it to organize and to interrupt this ruling class idol, to remind the people in power that the crisis isn’t over and the real danger isn’t overreaction, it is the sin of forgetting, the threat of failing to use this moment to fix a dangerously broken economy.

Does he really think that they don't know they are throwing us into poverty? Does he think it was an accident, and if the elite were made aware of the consequences of their actions they would change those actions? The crises is over; it was over a long time ago. Now the consequences are working themselves out on our families and friends and neighbors, and the only concern of the elite is that their propaganda organs, that they set up so long ago and paid so much money to maintain, continue their work of deflecting blame.

The elite are too powerful to be stopped. They have beefed up the police state all across the country in the name of fighting terrorism. They have harassed, isolated and demonized any active, physical protest. They have used the economic crises that they created to push wages lower and eliminate benefits. They have not cut the military budget, although the economic crises is now so severe that they are actually talking about it. Our elite are citizens of the world, and know that life is very good for the rich no matter where you are. Who cares if America becomes a Third World country?

The only thing they don't have is numbers. The next fight will be for the soul of the masses. The elite will win this fight too, because we still don't realize that they despise us and don't care if we live or die. We still look to authorities to save us instead of turning our back on the desperate, futile grab for just a tiny amount of power from the Democratic Party. Meanwhile the power of the desperate, angry, frightened masses will be co-opted by the elite for their own use, to turn the poor against each other instead of uniting them against the elite.

If we do not empower the poor we will lose our country forever.

There's Something About Megan

It takes a special person to say that peer review is unnecessary because it is not fool-proof, and McArdle is that special person!

Especially for papers that rely on empirical work with painstakingly assembled datasets, the only way for peer reviewers to do the kind of thorough vetting that many commentators seem to imagine is implied by the words "peer review" would be to . . . well, go back and re-do the whole thing. Obviously, this is not what happens.

::Giggle::

(Sorry, that just slipped out.)

This is not to say that the peer review system is worthless. But it's limited. Peer review doesn't prove that a paper is right; it doesn't even prove that the paper is any good (and it may serve as a gatekeeper that shuts out good, correct papers that don't sit well with the field's current establishment for one reason or another). All it proves is that the paper has passed the most basic hurdles required to get published--that it be potentially interesting, and not obviously false. This may commend it to our attention--but not to our instant belief.

Fact-checking and the criticism of one's peers are not a few of McArdle's favorite things, and therefore a strawman is duly built, erected, knocked down, set on fire, and its ashes are sown into the dirt.

Welcome back, McArdle!

The Theory In Practice

We've discussed why people obey authority. Let's look at the actual process.

Balloon Juice's DougJ discusses Ta-Nehisi Coates' support of George Weigel and Jeffrey Goldberg.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a thoughtful post about WeigelGate that is marred by this:

It’s always a problem when you have to state your affection for someone you’re blogging about—but I have great affection for Jeff (Golberg). That’s the personal side—the side that makes this a very uncomfortable post. But professionally, I have great respect for him as a reporter.

I have read a lot of Jeff Goldberg articles in the New Yorker and the truth is, when he’s not writing about the Middle East, he’s fine. But he was also the Judy Miller of Iraq-Al Qaeda connections.

It’s disappointing to me that someone who generally shoots as straight as TNC would give Goldberg a pass on this. But that’s the way it is, people reach a certain level of status in the media and can’t keep themselves out of the great Atlantic/National Journal garden party in the sky, no matter how hard they try to avoid it. (To be perfectly frank, this is why I never liked the idea of Journolist in the first place, the idea that all these high-level bloggers/pundits might be coordinating their message somehow, or at least airing their grievances publicly rather than privately, is a bit sickening.)

Perhaps the defining characteristic of our age is how much time political and media elites spend giving each other hand jobs.

DougJ is perfectly correct about the seduction of money and public notoriety. But Coates didn't really try. Coates also said this:

As much as I like Dave Weigel, and as much as I respect his work, I think that there is a valid complaint to be made by conservatives about his beat at the Washington Post. For me, the way to approach this is to ask myself what I would think if e-mails like these came out, circa 2008, revealing that a reporter assigned to cover the netroots was actually contemptuous of some its leadership.

If I couldn't see any bias in 2008 I wouldn't care in 2010.

I think I'd have a problem with that. And I think a lot of other liberals would too.

I'd be delighted to see a little contempt from the "liberal" press. We might get fewer articles on how Iran is about to get a nuclear bomb, or how Obama's civil rights abuses don't exist, or how social security is broke. It is not the job of a journalist to be impartial--his job is to write impartially. To find out the facts and figure out what they mean to the best of his ability in the time allowed, and report what he found to others. We want a reporter that is skeptical, questioning, and doesn't trust the leadership. Anyone who is friends with the people he covers will be a lousy reporter.

Goldberg is a real piece of work, as everyone else has amply shown. His maudlin post about the death of Arab children under Israeli bombings was sickening. [Added--see also.] But he and Coates both work for the same employer, and Coates supports his co-workers no matter how offensive they are. McArdle and Black Panthers, Douthat and unwed parenting, now Goldberg 's offensive behavior. When you work for an information broker who sells access to its reporters to major corporations, you will end up compromising yourself.

We live in a great and terrible world, and are helpless before the forces of real power. But even if we can't change the economic disasters, the environmental disasters, and the humanitarian disasters of our world, we can control how we react to them. The time to take a stand for what is right has long passed. The decision has been made. Now there is only the embarrassing silence and averted eye, and the sly jubilation of the already corrupted.

Ennui

We seem to have reached an impasse. How am I to mock libertarians if they actually, really, truly Go Galt? There has been only one post from the guest-bloggers at Megan McArdle's site since Wednesday and it was neither dim-witted nor offensive.

I miss McArdle. Sure, Jonah Goldberg is still an idiot, but he's been churning out the same crap for so long that he's become rote. By the way, Jonah, DC spends around $9,000-$10,000 per student per year, not $25,000. Where does your number come from?

What's that, Jonah? You think you and your fellow intellectuals are what?

Is It Just Me? [Jonah Goldberg]
Or has the Corner been on an upswing in quality of late? It could always use more collegial debate and banter, but this has been a pretty good week.

No, it's just you.

Liberal Authoritarians

The non-authoritarians will see multiple sides of an issue because there is nothing stopping them from seeing all sides. The authoritarians will see one side because they cannot bring themselves to break orthodoxy with their side and will not consider any information that conflicts with their beliefs.

Glenn Greenwald wrote that some liberals have been consistently defending Obama's authoritarian actions--his "wretched civil liberties abuses." Greenwald is correct; Obama did do what Greenwald said he did, and those abuses are a danger to us and a violation of liberal principles. Greenwald has documented administrative abuses in exhaustive detail over the last two years, just as he did during the Bush era. Greenwald discussed both what Obama could do and could not do, and criticized him for what he could have done but did not do.

Johnathan Chait, one of the people Greenwald mentions, responded. "[Jonathan] Bernstein Smacks Down Greenwald," he crowed. Bernstein contemptuously stated that the president has no power over senators, that he is no more than a clerk. Bernstein looks at what Obama could not do but ignores what Obama could do but didn't. Chait himself does not refute Greenwald at all.

Forced to state the obvious for people who will not see the obvious, Greenwald related the facts that showed Obama used his power to side with authority and refrained from using his power to support liberal principles.

Chait claimed that Greenwald was saying untrue, mean things about him and again ignored the facts about Obama.

In another post, Chait finally responded to facts by walking back on part of his statements (regarding presidential influence on foreign policy) and reiterating his earlier claims.

Greenwald responded saying that the facts stand for themselves, but added a few new facts that support his earlier statements and conclusively refuted one of Chait's claims. Greenwald, being Greenwald, throws another log on the fire in his update; more facts that support his claims.

Chait doesn't address the evidence in any meaningful way because he can't. To admit the facts is to admit Obama has no respect for the civil rights of others. So he avoids the facts, which is an emotionally difficult thing to do. In fact it is downright painful, and it's no wonder Chait complains that Greenwald is attacking him--he is under attack, by Greenwald's refusal to agree to take part in a massive lie.

Greenwald's posts are long because he supports his facts. He draws logical conclusions from those facts, instead of just saying what he wants to be true and ignoring any evidence to the contrary. There are liberal authoritarians just like there are conservative authoritarians, and they will not admit that Obama is an authoritarian leader because it violates the principles of their tribe.