The Business Of America

While I have been neglecting the question of authoritarianism and morality in politics I also have been neglecting my other duty, keeping an eye on Megan McArdle so you don't have to. Thanks to the commenter who pointed out that McArdle has snuggled down onto her new little perch, where she recommences to feather her nest and peck at any lice that might prevent her from doing what she does best, letting Megan be Megan.

The Benefits of Business Experience by Mrs. Megan McArdle, national celebrity and expert on failure and how to turn it to your advantage, as will be related in her new book Permission To Suck. Not that she needs it!

It's not crazy to worry that Obama hasn't got it.

Why are filthy-rich hedge fund managers, so enamored of Obama in the 2008 race, turning on him now? I endorse the rhetorical explanation: Barack Obama has made a habit of bashing financial types and rich people. Bankers and rich people, being people, do not like being treated as villains in Obama's campaign set pieces. So they are naturally disinclined to support him. I am shocked at how many New Yorkers I had thought to be rock-ribbed Democrats are attending Romney fundraisers. Not a huge number, mind you; it's not like they're going to tip New York from blue to red. But if any New Yorkers of my acquaintance were attending GOP fundraisers in the past, they certainly weren't admitting it in public, unless they already worked for National Review. So it does seem like a real change . . . and what they say when I ask them is that, well, they don't like being treated as villains in Obama's campaign set pieces.

Only a fake like McArdle could be a success in journalism without mastering that little thing call attribution. Salmon named some billionaires, why will McArdle not defend them by name? Who are the "rock-ribbed Democrats"? Here, also, is where things get a little fuzzy. It seems that either New Yorkers of McArdle's acquaintance are all hedge fund managers or all of McArdle's acquaintances think exactly like hedge fund managers. Since McArdle has a history friendship with a wide circle of DC libertarian and somewhat liberal bloggers and New York liberals, it turns out that lots and lots of people think just like hedge fund managers. Who knew?

Furthermore, we are supposed to believe that "rock-ribbed Democrats" are now attending Romney fundraisers, which means they are already contributing to his campaign and might contribute more. Anyone who has been reading the left bloggers recently will notice that rock-ribbed Democrats wouldn't vote for Romney if you held murdered babies over their heads. So to speak.

Megan McArdle: Mr. Rock-Ribbed Democratic Hedge Fund Manager! I am so very surprised to see you at this fundraiser!

Rock-Ribbed Democratic Hedge Fund Manager: Well, you know how it goes, Megan. All your beliefs go out the window when you hear your president deliver a few lukewarm populist statements in an election year. Some people might think we would be delighted with laws that cater to our needs, bank bailouts, a healthy stock market, and enormous rise in income equality but we know different. Barack Obama was in the White House for years but he never did anything with it.
 

It's entirely possible--nay, probable--that the hedge fund managers are still whining about mean old man Obama who told them to get off his lawn, as Felix Salmon relates in the post linked below, but it is impossible to determine the facts when none are offered. We must just suppose that as Megan McArdle's acquaintances go, so goes the world.  The only real new information we are given is that McArdle hobnobs with hedge fund billionaires or at the very least people who think like them, which is, no doubt,  central to her point.

Not everyone agrees with McArdle, strange though that may be.

Felix Salmon, however, offers a different view:

There’s a limit to how far you can go asking people to justify their Hitler analogies, so Chrystia asks Cooperman about his “never worked a day in his life” comment. It turns out that by “working”, Cooper means that Obama “never made payroll. He’s never built anything”. In other words, this is very much the Romney version of the great-men-of-history worldview: one where a handful of visionary builders use their skills to create jobs for the masses and wealth for themselves. Recall Nick Lemann, profiling Romney in last week’s New Yorker:

He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one. Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company — Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s — it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero.

If you’re the billionaire principal of a business you built yourself, then you are very likely to see the world through this lens — and as a result, you’re very likely to be very supportive of Romney’s candidacy.

Felix implies that there is something faintly ridiculous about this.

 

Who's that shyly peeping out from beneath McArdle's skirt? Why I do believe it is Ms. Ayn Rand, tireless* purveyor of the great-man-of-history worldview and Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle's philosophical hero. McArdle is much too afraid modest to admit to being a Randian since the intellectual elite ridicule the poor quality of Rand's work, but McArdle's desire to worship the elite is obvious.

I myself am on the record as saying that being a CEO does not make you a good president. And yet, I do think there is something to this complaint.

First and most of all, any discussion of a CEO presidency must immediately address the subject of Bush, Geo. W., who just a few years ago spent eight years as president of these United States, well within the memory span of Ms. McArdle, who is nearly 40. Bush was celebrated as our CEO president and we all know how that turned out. Yet McArdle utterly ignores Bush and the little fact that Romney's business experience was in vulture capitalism, not manufacturing or retail. He ran a chop shop for rich men, which is business experience of a sort but not the kind you want to use when running a country. And according to McArdle, she chose Bush 2004 not because he was a CEO president, but because she was afraid Kerry would nationalize health care and "cut and run" in Iraq. In fact:

  I don't think the president has much, if anything, to do with how the economy runs, unless he's one of those disastrous tinkerers, like FDR and Richard Nixon. Neither of the current candidates is such a lackwit, meaning that their impact on the economy will be minimal indeed. Neither candidate gets my vote here.

So obviously the president doesn't need CEO experience after all.

Obama has almost no experience with the private, profit-making sector: a few summer jobs, and one year as an editor at a business intelligence service.

Obama was a low-level editor in Reference Services, working on reports describing economic conditions in various foreign countries.

By all accounts, he disliked the work, not just because it was pedestrian and boring, but because it was in business. "He calls it working for the enemy," Obama's mother, Ann, wrote after a phone conversation with her son, "because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in [Third World] countries."

Of course, we've had many good presidents with no business experience. But Obama's whole administration tends to be light on people from outside the academia--NGO--government triangle. It's something that's increasingly true of Washington in general--and, I think, increasingly problematic.

McArdle's head is so firmly fixed up her gargantuan copy of Atlas Shrugged that she can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. Just as conservatives cannot leave the happy Land of Imagination in which they are the respected inheritors and protectors of western civilization, McArdle's libertarian fantasy world is a Willy Wonka candyland of boot-strapping men and women who built noble industries with the sweat of their brow and a handful of beans. These Randian Ubermenschen suffer horribly from the depredations of the effete,  elite intelligentsia, who all want to destroy the rich to compensate for their own inadequacy. Only by understanding McArdle's point of view, a wandering mishmash of anecdotes, personal biography and economic hero worship, can one even begin to make sense of this post.

Let's join her as she defends her noble captains of industry, who must steer the ship of state safely between the rocky shoals of liberal extravagance and wind-swept waves of conservative meddling. To do this we must immediately jump from poor, persecuted hedge fund managers to mid-management company employees, two creatures who have little in common, but it takes very little imagination to conclude that McArdle wants to imbue the financial elite with the virtues of the middle class businessman to make the former seem a little less like Whiny, Sleazy and Greedy, three of the Seven Dwarfs of capitalism.

 I have now worked in journalism for (gulp) almost ten years, longer than I've done anything else. But before I worked in journalism, I had permanent, full time jobs as a secretary, a help desk technician, an admin at a corporate training firm, and some higher-level jobs designing and building networks for financial clients.

I don't think "permanent" means what she thinks it means. Perhaps she meant to say that she considered these jobs as permanent, which would be most unusual for someone as educated, ambitious and indebted as McArdle. Still, one hesitates to call a lady a  liar over such a small thing. Although it is also difficult to understand how a secretary or help desk technician gained the ability to assess CEOs. Her professors must have covered such things in business school but they were academics, and as McArdle tell us quite often, academics know nothing. Or everything.

When I was unemployed in New York, I started developing my own technology consulting business for small firms, with all that implies in the way of paying taxes and going on sales calls and managing cash flow.

Since McArdle has said that she was desperately poor while being provided with room and board by her parents on the Upper West Side of New York, one surmises that the business was not successful, and therefore perhaps McArdle's understanding of business experience might not be the same as that of a CEO or even presidential candidate.

I also, as long-time readers know, spent a year doing administrative work in a construction trailer down at Ground Zero.

She ran the copy machine. 

These were not jobs that were designed to season young people before moving them up, nor waystops for same; they were mostly permanent jobs, whose main focus was on making customers happy, not nurturing tomorrow's elite. (And indeed, probably half my co-workers had either never attended college, or never finished.) We measured our results in profit and loss, not newspaper writeups or web links.

So these lower level jobs did not lead to high advancement. This will be important later. 

When I look at a lot of what gets written these days, I see how valuable that is. I'm not claiming that my work experience was all that comprehensive, and as an entrepreneur, I wasn't much of an entrepreneur. But what it does give me is some exposure to the legions of people who labor their whole lives at jobs that are kinda fine--and at least a little inkling about how companies, and company managers, think. Which is often not at all how the policy elites with whom I am now surrounded seem to think that they think.

To peddle Myth #1, McArdle must peddle Myth #2: Academics are all liberal obsessed with white guilt and all government workers are incompetents who just want to keep their jobs. Like teachers. And running a shoe store or small factory is just like running the country.
 

The increasingly mandarin elite, hygienically removed from the grubby business of scrounging for customers, frequently seems to have no idea at all what goes on in companies. Stop grinning, Republicans; I mean you too. Yes, too many liberals seem to believe that all infelicitous market outcomes can be cured by appointing a commission composed of really top-notch academics--during the debate over health care reform, the words "peer reviewed study" were invoked by supporters with no less touching a faith than an Italian grandmother performing a rosary for the salvation of the godless Communists.

I haven't seen "mandarin elite" since I last read The Corner. McArdle is still bitter over her loss now that "Obamacare" has been enacted. She did not notice that the right wrote the plan, the medical insurance industry favored the plan, and the insurance industry was given a huge bonus, as people who would be forced to drop insurance as the economy worsens will now be forced to keep it. She is also bitter that all that Koch money couldn't buy her tribe academic respectability and copious cosy jobs but that is what conspicuous consumption is for.

On the other hand, here comes the GOP claiming that entrepreneurship can be started or stopped with small changes in marginal tax rates, as if one were turning on and off a light. This is no less of a technocratic fallacy, even if, as with many technocratic fallacies, there is a grain of sound theory buried somewhere under that towering mountain of unwarranted assumptions.

Yes, conservatives sure are stupid, but they do have some right ideas, such as cutting taxes on the rich. But academics are even more stupid because they think they know how to run companies when they really don't and just muck up everything with their meddling instead. Which makes Paul Krugman either Fred, Shaggy or Scooby, I believe.

The result is that companies usually get treated as a rather simple variable in a model rather than the complex organizations they are. For example, you see people reasoning from corporate behavior to efficacy: if fast food companies spend a lot of money on advertising, then said advertising must make kids eat more fast food; if hiring managers demand a college degree for positions that didn't used to require one, there must be a good business reason. "They wouldn't do it," says the argument, "if it didn't work."

If you've actually worked at a company, this is a ludicrous statement. Companies do stuff that doesn't work all the time, and it can take decades to unwind even the stupidest expenditures and rules.

If companies do stupid things all the time why would we want a businessman/CEO type running the country? Or is McArdle telling us again that the only road to success is through failure?

And I had no idea that corporate advertising was stupid because it didn't work. Why on earth have corporations spent so many millions on advertising that doesn't work? Why do politicians do the same? Has anyone ever told the advertising industry this, or have they just been laughing up their sleeves at everyone all this time? Mad Men? You mean Malevolent Men!

More importantly, when they do have good reasons, they are often not the reasons that outsiders think. The elite projects their own concerns onto the company, instead of asking the company what it's worried about.

This is a sterling example of why people call McArdle an idiot. Academics, who are all elites you know, should be asking CEOs and other businessmen what the latter are worried about, so they can put their thinky minds to work solving the business problems. (Just as employees should be worrying about what their bosses need instead of worrying their pretty little heads about stuff like wages and working conditions.)  Instead of doing silly academic exercises like studying inflation or depressions or Keynsian economics they should be figuring out how to get people to buy more stuff.

Take advertising. Some of it aims to increase consumption of a product; the "Got Milk?" campaign is a famous example. But that doesn't mean it works--the Got Milk? campaign,which went nationwide in 1995, doesn't look to me like it had much lasting impact on milk sales.

Actually, if you look at the link you will see that milk sales stopped falling, the reason for the campaign in the first place, and ended up higher than before the campaign. If you read the history of the Got Milk campaign, which is very interesting, you will see that it was a California campaign meant to increase California milk consumption, which it did while becoming a cultural phenomenon in a small way and winning many awards. All in all, the campaign was tremendously successful.

Yet that doesn't mean it was unsuccessful, because the trade association that paid for it probably did achieve its primary goal: showing members that they were actively promoting the interests of dairy farmers. The members, not milk-buyers, may have been the real "audience" for that campaign.

Just like her father, who was managing director for the trade association of New York city construction companies called General Contractors Association. Evidently he was wasting his time by pretending to actively promote their interests while he really just wanted to milk them of a high salary instead. In fact, he is very much an example of the "academia--NGO--government triangle" that McArdle was discussing earlier but moved from government to private practice to academia and back again, not NGOs. It's odd that McArdle ignored the famous revolving door between business and government. Maybe it just slipped her mind. However we know he provided service in return for his high pay, contra McArdle, when the government investigated organized crime's role in construction.

Commenting on Mr. Goldstock’s [director of the state’s Organized Crime Task Force] findings , the managing director of the General Contractors Association, Francis X. McArdle, said he was ”unaware of any pervasive patterns of corruption” regarding his group. The association represents more than 100 contractors primarily engaged in construction of public buildings and plants.

Mr. McArdle also disputed the need for a new investigative agency. ”We don’t need more people tripping over each other in search of glory, facts or whatever,” he said.

Like father, like daughter. Who needs to find out why banks fail or mortgage companies break the law? Things just happen and there's no villains and there's nothing we can do about anything.

But advertising isn't even always aimed at raising consumption. GM does not spend money on car ads because it hopes that many more people will start driving, or that some of them will buy three cars instead of one. The purpose of a car ad is to make people buy your car instead of your competitor's. It's certainly possible that this is how McDonalds thinks about its advertising, but the policy elite isn't worried about McDonalds putting Burger King out of business, it's worried about fat kids.

 Let us pause to note that McArdle is complaining that the "policy elite," also known as academics and government officials, care about kids' health instead of McDonald's profits. The bastards. How could their values be so out of wack?

And of course, we shouldn't count out the possibility that companies spend a lot on advertising because they don't know whether it works--and don't dare find out. An immense amount of IT spending is done this way.

If McArdle were actually a real journalist instead of someone who plays on tv she would do some research and find out if she was correct. If she read even one article she would discover that McDonald's spends two billion a year on advertising, that its advertising campaigns have been very successful in increasing sales and encompass everything from movie-tie-in toys in Happy Meals to product placement in movies to lavishing attention and perks on mommy bloggers, and it knows every detail of its advertising campaigns, including efficacy and cost, down to the last dollar.. It's a fascinating tale as McDonald's has such an enormous market share and is a part of American culture, but you will not hear that tale from Miss Megan, who is not one to let facts get in the way of peddling her propaganda.

To recap: we now know that advertising doesn't work because advertisements do not change behavior. Therefore, whenever the "policy elite" "projects their own concerns onto the company," they are doomed to failure. The advertising companies all know they are failures but they want to be paid so they just pretend to do their job. The corporations go along with all of this expensive Kabuki because they are afraid to find out if they are wasting their money.

Which is why we should elect a CEO president, so he can tax the country to pay for services we won't get but are too afraid to find if we will get them or not. I thought we were already doing that. 

I'm not claiming that McDonalds advertising doesn't make kids eat more, by the way; I'm just saying that this is a fact which has to be proven on its own merits, not inferred from corporate behavior.

Ah, the classic McArdle double-fake. I didn't say what I just said, I am just saying that it is possible that what I said but did not say is true. If only there were a way to find out....

The flip side of this is the people who think that companies don't do anything at all that couldn't be done better by government or academia . . . except sit back and rake the money in. This is particularly prevalent in discussions of health care, but it frequently pops up elsewhere. 

My goodness, it sure is silly to think that national health care could work. And since government can't do anything right, maybe it was a mistake to let it run the war effort in WWII, or the space program, or the NIH or CDC or the highway system or anything else. Because adding a layer of profit to any endeavor is sure to make it cheaper and more efficient.

My favorite in this genre is Jerry Avorn, the professor of pharmacoeconomics who told Ezra Klein that we didn't really need drug companies because now academics with good drug prospects could simply go straight to the capital markets and raise money to fund their own projects. This is simply breathtakingly wrong. For one thing, venture capitalists want an exit strategy before they will put money in, and in biotech, exit is often a sale to a big pharmaceutical firm; no Big Pharma, no VC funds. And second, few newly hatched biotech firms have the complementary capacities to bring a drug to market by themselves. Forget the sales force; I'm talking about the expertise to get the thing through the FDA approval process and produce it in massive quantities. How do they acquire those capacities? They partner with Big Pharma, or license to them.

I doubt Jerry Avorn would tolerate someone making sweeping statements about what a hypertension drug would do without, say, making a basic investigation into the properties of the cardiovascular system. But among policy elites, there's frequently a reluctance to do this with companies, because the companies are seen as self-interested; spending too much time listening to them will only compromise your objectivity.

"The companies are seen as self-interested." Well, no wonder those elite academics are so confused and are so willing to force their body politic on the innocent, vulnerable billionaires. The government and academia think that businesses are in the business of making money and might even do things are, perhaps, in theory, a little less than altruistic. Which could never happen, and which is why all those rumors of massive pollution in Koch industries could not possibly be true.

At a salon dinner in Washington not long ago,

Ah, yes. The Atlantic salon dinners, in which The Atlantic pimped McArdle out to corporations, who eagerly repeated everything they wanted her to say.

I found myself explaining why so many people go into consulting: it's less exhausting than corporate jobs. One of my friends who went into the management training program at a telecom firm out of business school found himself managing a call center. It's a responsible position, but it's also a little stressful and not always interesting.

"I'm sorry," said one of the other attendees, a very smart and insightful person who writes beautifully and knows a whole lot about economics, "but if you get an MBA from Chicago, and you manage a call center, you're an idiot."

Likewise, anyone who pays $100,000 for an MBA and ends up training to be a fake journalist at the Koches' Institute for Humane Studies must be an idiot as well.

This is pretty much exactly wrong. If you are going to someday be a senior manager at a major telecom firm, you should absolutely manage a call center: nowhere else will you get the kind of hands on experience with the firm's customer base in their most irascible, demanding moments, or learn as much about the company's cost structure and operational challenges. And surely it is not actually idiotic, even for someone with an MBA from a top school, to want to be a senior manager at a major telecom firm?

Didn't McArdle say earlier that the lower level jobs were permanent jobs? And don't most top jobs go to people from top schools with top credentials and top contacts?

And yet, it's such an unsurprisng remark, because this so often seems to me to be the animating spirit of our governing class. The purpose of an elite education, the thinking goes, is to equip you to design and run the system by which 300 million Americans live together--and to ensure that you never, ever have to actually interact with the 280 million who did not graduate from an elite academic program.

McArdle, as always, extrapolates from personal experience.

To be sure, that's a charge that can often be leveled at consulting and finance--the two jobs where Romney got his fortune, and apparently, many of his supporters. But at least the consultants and the bankers have to convince some very non-elite CEOs to give them money, and their non-elite employees to give them information. At least their performance gets measured by a metric that's hard to fudge for very long, or spin into something more pleasing: is there more money in the bank, or less, at the end of the quarter? And the people who do run non-elite, consumer focused small businesses are also disproportionately going for Romney over Obama.

It's like the last four years never happened. No bank failures, no bailouts, no hidden bad investments. Tra-la-la, McArdle skips merrily past the truth and down the garden path.

That same article (on a poll by SurePayroll) also included the following quote:

“It’s deeply concerning that optimism plunged 15 points at a time when we’re struggling to maintain the recovery,” said SurePayroll CEO and President Michael Alter. “This suggests a lack of growth through the election, but what’s more troubling is what it could mean beyond that. When small business owners are not optimistic, they’re not investing and they’re not hiring."

It seems small businessmen lean towards Romney because they are very stupid; they form their business plans around their mental state, not the needs of their business. When small business owners don't have order to fill they don't invest and they don't hire. No matter how pessimistic or optimistic they are, hiring depends on demand, not their mood. McArdle might want to read her source material some time--it's very odd but the material frequently does not support her claims, at least not convincingly. She might want to look into that some time.

This is not to disparage jobs outside of business. I have one. So do most of my friends and family. The people in those jobs work very hard, they are often brilliant, and they even occasionally contribute something positive to the world--something that is hard to say about, say, an associate structuring a really innovative tax-arbitrage deal.

But ultimately, businesses are where all the money comes from to pay for us to opine about the state of the world--present and potential. They are the ones who generate the goods and services, the advertising dollars and tax revenue, that keep the rest of us afloat. It matters that fewer and fewer of us have any real experience at all with how they work. We sit in our air conditioned offices and presume to plan the economy, yet how many of us could keep a trucking firm in business for a whole month, sell a customer on an unfamiliar new generator technology, or turn a lawn-mower repair shop from deficit to profit?
 

"We" plan the economy? No, I don't think so. McArdle writes for a Tina Brown blog, she doesn't plan anything except her next extravagant purchase.

I'll be the first to say that I couldn't. What my time in the private sector gave me is mostly a terrific respect for how hard it is to manage a business, particularly one filled with workers who are doing a job, not pursuing a vocation.

The world appears to be overflowing with academics and journalists who could do a much better job running the Fortune 500 than those grasping yahoos in the C-Suite . . . if only they weren't so busy with their research. But I am not among them. I hate repetitive jobs unless they involve data collation, dislike telling other people what to do, can't stand to make sales calls, and have a low tolerance for the minutiae of management. And so my hat is off to anyone who manages to keep a business in the black. Even if they make a bunch of really stupid mistakes.

When Obama sat down with the auto task force to confront the problems of reorganizing GM, the first thing he asked was "Why can't they make a Corolla?"

There are a lot of answers to that--cost structure, labor practices, the structure of the American car market, the pool of automotive engineering talent available to American manufacturers. But the simplest one is that GM is not Toyota.
 

And humans are not bonobos.

Companies are individuals, with individual strengths and weaknesses, and a Car Czar cannot turn one company into another any more than a surgeon could turn you into one of your cousins. To even ask the question seems to reveal immense hubris: why, oh why, has GM not done the obvious and produced what I, in my imperial wisdom, believe to be the car of the future?

I think you can make an argument that consultants and bankers do quite a bit of this, with money and interest rates replacing policy levers. But I also think you can argue that they do somewhat less of it, because at the end of the day, they do have to get in there and deal with an actual company; if sales plummet, it's no good pointing to your model and declaring that it's still working fine.

So when America's sales plummet and America can no longer make payroll, we need a CEO president who will be able to make cold calls to Russia and China to get them to buy our iron ore and guns.

This emphatically does not necessarily mean that Romney will therefore be a great president, or that you should vote for him. I have lots of thoughts on this, but given how long this post is already, I will have to share them on another day. For now, I'll just say that whatever the flaws of Mitt Romney, or the financiers who support him, I think that the worry about Obama's lack of business experience is a fair concern--and that I wish more of our leaders and policy analysts had started their careers in the private sector, seeing how it creates the wealth that they deploy.

We started out talking about hedge fund managers but now we end up with a paean to the workers of the world, or at least the people who hire the workers of the world and create most of America's wealth. Therefore we must vote for Mitt Romney (not that she is telling us to vote for Mitt Romney, mind you) because Obama never ran a Stop-n-Go and therefore has no idea how to run the country, despite the fact that he has been doing just that for years.

People are rightly concerned with McArdle's dishonesty but her biggest problem is that she just isn't very bright.

*The amphetamines helped, no doubt.

There Is Always More To Lose

If you do not vote for Obama for president, Republicans will win and the consequences will be horrible.

If you do not vote for Obama in the primary, Republicans will win and the consequences will be horrible.

If you criticize Obama in office, Republican congressmen will win policy battles and the consequences will be horrible.

If you criticize prosecution of whistleblowers and lack of prosecution of the financial elite, Democrats will lose to Republicans and the poor and middle class will suffer.

If you criticize prosecution of whistleblowers, the continuation of torture and illegal wars, and lack of prosecution of people who engage in torture and illegal wars when they are committed by Democrats, Democrats will lose to Republicans and prosecution of whistleblowers, torture and illegal wars will continue.

If you point out that Obama said he will cut Social Security and Medicare, Democrats will lose to Republicans and Romney will cut Social Security and Medicare.

If you point out that Obama withheld Plan B from rape and incest victims, Obama will lose to Republicans and Romney will nominate Supreme Court justices who will prevent rape and incest victims from getting abortions.

There is no end to these capitulation---none.  People will accept any horror until they are so desperate that they finally feel they have no choice but to fight back.

What else are people willing to give up? What if Obama does not nominate a pro-choice Supreme Court justice? Will people accept that? After all, we still need unemployment insurance.  We’re willing to let foreign brown women die to preserve Roe v. Wade; surely we’re willing to let American white women die to preserve unemployment insurance.

There is always more to lose.

The problem is not that we are voting for the lesser of two evils. The problem is that once you start voting for the lesser of two evils you will never, ever get what you want, what you are ostensibly voting for. We have been conditioned to support atrocities because our owners toss us a few crumbs every so often and we are so badly off that we need those crumbs to stay alive. But the only reason we are so badly off is because we won't risk losing those crumbs. The tea partiers genuinely believe that Obama will hand over the country to Islam while handing over their money to the blahs but they ignored their party leaders and voted in tea party candidates. They won because they were willing to risk something to win. They used their power. They’re still crazy, but now they are crazies a with little more power.

Maybe it’s stupid to want anything more. Maybe we are now so powerless that we should just shut up and take what we can get. Let the rich tell us we are scum and should work for crumbs and be grateful that they let us have that.

But the first lesson of abusive behavior is this: if you let abusers get away with abusing you, the only lesson they learn is that they can abuse you and you will let them get away with it.

 

And one more lesson as a bonus: Now that we know that most Democrats favor personal gain over morality, it is very stupid for liberal bloggers to work for free. Digby should be paid buckets of money by the Democratic Party, as should driftglass and all the other excellent bloggers who work for donations. They should stop blogging at once and put their energies into getting paid for all the free labor they are providing instead. When you aren’t even getting crumbs from your betters you might want to rethink your business plan.

The Naked Truth

Be still my heart!

Project S.H.A.M.E.: Megan McArdle, a Covert Republican Party Activist Trained by the Billionaire Koch Brothers

We are delighted to post the latest offering of Project S.H.A.M.E., a media transparency initiative led by Yasha Levine and Mark Ames.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/project-s-h-a-m-e-on-megan-mcardle-portrait-of-a-taxpayer-subsidized-libertarian.html#RCLp1a516A77cXko.99

Go, read! Then read it again!

Little Bootstraps

Everyone is saying that Romney's 47% speech is the real Romney but that's not entirely true. He was playing to his audience and attempting to manipulate them as well.  All of the speech's quotes are from David Corn's article on the event.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

People who lie, cheat and steal must find a way of living with their acts. They use denial and projection to alleviate any guilt they might feel. Just as Megan McArdle carefully told us that she just happened to meet a (Black) man who told her* that he didn't have a problem with with wealthy whites buying up the homes in her formerly African-American neighborhood because "they weren't doing anything with it anyway," Romney soft-soaps the very rich by telling them that the poor are poor because they are lazy and greedy.

Nobody is more filled with entitlement than the rich. For instance, take Romney.

Contending that he is a self-made millionaire who earned his own fortune, Romney insisted, "I have inherited nothing." He remarked, "There is a perception, 'Oh, we were born with a silver spoon, he never had to earn anything and so forth.' Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you can have: which is to get born in America."

Nothing could be more untrue. He was the son of a wealthy governor, went to expensive schools, and was able to avoid service in Vietnam. These schools and privliges enabled him to attend Harvard, paid for by family money. But these facts do not flatter his ego, so Romney chooses to lie to himself and others instead.

When one attendee asked how this group could help Romney sell himself to others, he answered, "Frankly, what I need you to do is to raise millions of dollars." He added, "The fact that I'm either tied or close to the president…that's very interesting."

It takes a multi-millionaire to jerk around multi-millionaires. Such people are only interested in winners; Sheldon Adelson dropped Newt like a stone when it became obvious he was a loser.

What [Obama's] going to do, by the way, is try and vilify me as someone who's been successful, or who's, you know, closed businesses or laid people off, and is an evil bad guy. And that may work.

Obama, who rescused the banking industry, also had his eye on his constituents, who wanted to be told that Obama would fight the financial industries on their behalf. Obama told them what they wanted to hear but this irritated the Entitled Elite. They expect to be praised, not villified. Romney stroked their egos and reminded them that the left saw them as villains.

I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular who have done races around the world. I didn't realize it. These guys in the US—the Karl Rove equivalents—they do races all over the world: in Armenia, in Africa, in Israel. I mean, they work for Bibi Netanyahu in his race. So they do these races and they see which ads work, and which processes work best, and we have ideas about what we do over the course of the campaign. I'd tell them to you, but I'd have to shoot you.

Guns for hire don't care whom they shoot. There's no difference between one country or another, one political race or another, for the global elite. They have little allegiance to their own country except in the abstract.

They'll probably be looking at what the polls are saying. If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy. If the president gets reelected, I don't know what will happen. I can—I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected. But my own view is that if we get a "Taxageddon," as they call it, January 1st, with this president, and with a Congress that can't work together, it's—it really is frightening.

Romney is trying to straddle a delicate line here, by trying to play on the rich's fears while telling them that they inspire such admiration and confidence that they will heal the economy just by showing up. The stock market and banking system have recovered quite well from the disaster they caused, thanks to the taxpayers' bank bailouts, and they all know it. Their economy is global, and they all know that too. The American consumer, the source of 70% of the economy, are not doing nearly as well and Romney's election will do nothing to improve their lot. Republican Congressmen never had any intention of "working together." They all know this, and all ignore it.

But Romney knows what they--and he--want to hear, and he delivers it to them. The rest of us, as we always knew, do not count, and if we suffer and die it is our own fault for not working hard and smart enough, like Willard "Little Bootstraps"** Romney.


*or so she claims

**

The 47%

Senior citizens.

Kiss your Social Security good-bye, Grandpa!

Children.

Medicaid just breeds independence. Unhook those tubes at once so he can breathe the air of economic freedom!

The military.

Why don't they pull themselves up by their bootstraps?

The Heartland.

Too bad all those family farms were replaced by subsidized industrial farming, by the way.

The South.

Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton the bottom ranking for every socio-economic category...!

Just as Mitt Romney says, we need to forget about all those people who don't pay income taxes. They'll never get him elected so they don't count. And when the election is over, the 99% won't put money in Willard's pocket and they won't count either.

This is what the lesser of two evils gets us: A man who is so determined to fit in with the elite that he out-conservatives them, and a man so pickled in privilege that he doesn't think anyone outside of his tax bracket even exists, for all intents and purposes.

Cleaning Up The Mess

Shorter David Brooks: Four years ago Barack Obama promised to fix all of the messes our government has somehow fallen into, yet we still have problems. Obama should immediately institute big programs. I will not mention the facts that the Repubublicans created the problems, left the problems for others to clean up, will do everything humanly possible to prevent the problems from being fixed, and will spend the entire time that Obama is cleaning up the mess telling the country that Obama is destroying the world.


Brooks will also not tell us that the creative destruction worked; that the middle class is now poorer, the very rich is now very richer, the decent jobs have gone overseas and left behind clerking jobs, and that after that wholesale theft, Obama handed the banks more of our money and refused to prosecute any of the thieves. 

A very long time ago I said that the rich were working actively to steal your money, eliminate Social Security and Medicare, and force you to work for third world wages, while eliminating their own taxes and offloading all their liabilities on the taxpayer. They are well on their way to accomplishing this goal because they have all the money and power and we have none. If we cannot stop the theft of a way of life, torture, persecution, lawlessness, and loss of privacy, we are powerless.

That is the bigger picture. The smaller picture is that the Republicans are effing crazy and you can't let Crazy loose or they'll kill the chickens and scare the horses. So yes, we vote and fight and mock, whatever we do best. Vote for Obama if you must, and elect councilmen and representatives and mayors who will hopefully help the poor instead of the rich.

But the rich see the big picture. They paint it, stroke by stroke, and their works will last long after they are dead.  They spent millions putting Obama in office because they knew he would hand over taxpayer money to the banks. Don't tell people to shut up or go away because they're just too precious to live in our cold cruel world when they try to tell the truth.

We like to joke that facts have a liberal bias but they don't. They are constant and inexorable and they will not go away no matter how much we may wish to ignore them. The only way we are ever going to regain our power is to tell the truth. Truth has more power than any political party, nation, or class.

The Hero Of Janesville, The Man They Call Ayn

For all my fellow Joss Whedon fans.

 

 

Ayn!

 

The Man they call Ayn!

He robbed for the rich and he stole from the poor,

He stood up for The Man and he'd give him much more

Our love for him now, aint hard to explain,

The hero of Janesville, the man they call Ayn!

 

 

Our Ayn saw Wall Streeters' backs breakin'

He saw the lawyers' lament

And he saw the lice and scum takin'

Every dollar and leavin' five cents

So he said, "You can't do that to my people"

"You can't crush them under your heel"

Ayn strapped on his lies

And before the ink dries

Steals everything the Boomers had to steal

 

 

He robbed for the rich and he stole from the poor,

He stood up for The Man and he'd give him much more

Our love for him now, aint hard to explain,

The hero of Janesville, the man they call Ayn!

 

 

Now here is what separates producers

From moochers like you and I

The man they call Ayn

He turned 'round his train

And let all his lies hit sky

He dropped lies onto conventions

He dropped lies into tv sets

And the man they call Ayn

He just rode that damned train

'Til he became a GOP star

 

He robbed for the rich and he stole from the poor,

He stood up for The Man and he'd give him much more

Our love for him now, aint hard to explain,

The hero of Janesville, the man they call Ayn!

Attention Must Be Paid

Wow. What did Willard Romney ever do (or not do) to David Brooks?

After his mission, he attended Harvard, studying business, law, classics and philosophy, though intellectually his first love was always tax avoidance. After Harvard, he took his jawline to Bain Consulting, a firm with very smart people with excessive personal hygiene. While at Bain, he helped rescue many outstanding companies, like Pan Am, Eastern Airlines, Atari and DeLorean.

And that's just a tiny sample. When the world's biggest authoritarian ass-kisser mocks the right's biggest authority, you know that nobody except for some tea-baggers and Ann Romney expect Romney to win. When you add on Maureen Dowd's evisceration, it's clear that Team Romney has neglected a very important aspect of political life: flattering the egos of the Villagers. He had better start holding press picnics and handing out free booze immediately or he's going to find himself in the same boat as the Clintons.

Added: And his arrogance is pissing off the tea-baggers and Ron Paul followers as well. Well done, Mr. Romney! He could not make it more clear that the only people he cares about are the 1%.

CouponCare

Great. The Republicans want seniors to have voucher-based medical care.

Paul Krugman:

So there it is: the draft Republican platform says of Medicare and Medicaid,

The first step is to move the two programs away from their current unsustainable defined-benefit entitlement model to a fiscally sound defined-contribution model.

That means that instead of Medicare as we know it, which pays your medical bills, you’d get a lump sum which you can apply to private insurance — they’ll yell when we call it a voucher, but that’s what it is....

Bear in mind that health expenses will still have to be mainly paid for by some kind of insurance; that’s in the nature of medical care, with its high but unpredictable cost. So what we’re doing here is replacing government insurance with a program that gives people money to buy private insurance — that is, adding an extra layer of middlemen. Why would this save money? I guess the answer is supposed to be the magic of the marketplace — but we have the experience of Medicare Advantage, plus studies of Medicaid versus private insurance, plus the raw fact that America relies more on private insurance than any other nation and also has by far the highest costs. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the record suggests that this will do anything other than make health care less efficient.

We are assured that any seniors who vote for Richie Rich/Ayn Rand this time won't lose his or her Medicare, just the rest of us. Of course some seniors have wives young enough to lose out on this deal, but they must be poor if they need Medicare so they don't count.

You'll Thank Me Later

There are two types of mighty soldiers who man the Vagina Watch, that perpetual duty to preserve and protect the nation's Fetus-Americans by policing vaginas. The first type is genuinely religious, and is fully embodied by Miss Kathryn Jean Lopez, who believes that abortion is evil and must be stopped because only God can take a life. As we can see by this post, Miss Lopez sees pregnancy from rape as a blessing, and her anti-abortion beliefs are consistent in this narrow instance.

Miss Lopez also believes that there should be no separation between church and state, no premarital sex, no birth control, and that the role of women is to serve God and men by bearing their children and taking care of their home, and live through men by supporting their endeavors. She is as nutty as a Megan McArdle nut cake, but she lives her beliefs.

The second type is the opportunist, who demands that everyone else live by his beliefs while holding different standards for himself. He is the leader while the Miss Lopezes are the followers, in his own eyes if nobody else's. Ross Douthat believes that pregnancies from rape are "exceptional circumstances" that produce "unique agony" and anyway forcing women to carry their rapist's baby to term is probably a "political impossibility." Despite his own political compromises, Douthat goes on to criticize Obama's, calling Obama an extremist for supporting his own party's platform.

Douthat's entire post is a work of art, as he attempts to convince Democrats that capitalizing on the Republicans' extremism is a terrible political mistake. He does not discuss the constitutional right to privacy, which is hard and boring and the only thing that counts. He tries to sway his audience emotionally, which is a mistake because not many people can empathize with an emotionally stunted misanthrope. Watching Douthat at work is like watching Monk, as Douthat tries to convince everyone else to live with his own personal quirks, foibles and compulsions. Just because Douthat wants to live in a narrow little world of arbitrary rules doesn't mean that we do.

Especially when those arbitrary rules are designed to preserve Douthat's personal power and career and their consequences are designed to affect only women.

The Rats are In The Corn

Reading about Willard "Mitt" Romney's little birther joke and the lack of respect he and his followers show towards women and minorities, I have to wonder why anyone on the left calls him anything but Willard. (Preferably while humming "Ben," the theme music to the movie "Willard."* There's no reason why we shouldn't try to enjoy this potential sexually repressed plutocratic nightmare a little.)

Remember, the Villagers and their minions want to be cool more than anything else on Earth. They have money and power but they can't buy what they want most of all--self esteem. Obviously the only way they could be cool is if they created their own reality in which they are cool, forcing everyone else to live in that fantasy as well. Destroy the fantasy and you destroy the authority.

Willard dresses up as an authority, plays leader and cop and bishop. While he was play acting, real men were being shipped off to war. Willard mugs for the camera, he does not lead. He can live in a fantasy world in which he is cool but nobody else has to play along.

From wonkette:

from The Raw Story:

There is something slightly creepy about Willard. It's not important compared to what he wants to do to the country but it affects his electability and makes him very uncool.


*See Correction in comments

Authoritarian Worship And Manliness

Oh, my. The Republicans are falling all over each other to prove that their entire self-image is based on living vicariously through their leaders. From The Corner's Kevin Williamson, via what will soon be everyone on the internet:

Elections are not about public policy. They aren’t even about the economy. Elections are tribal, and tribes are — Occupy types, cover your delicate ears — ruthlessly hierarchical. Somebody has to be the top dog.

Authoritarians are very happy to think about how rich their leaders are, how much power they have over their women conquests, the size of their property, their bank account, their car collections, their physical attributes. They think that worshipping another man makes them more manly, that watching another man consume makes them richer, that hearing about another man's exercise habits make them more virtuous. Let's take a little look at Mr. Williamson.

This is not the face of a man who will ever be top dog. This is the face of a man who depended on the wide and welcoming arm of the Kochtopus to make a living. A man who first worked for a conservative paper that folded, then conducted college seminars on journalism for the Koches' Institute for Humane Studies, the same illustrious organization that incubated Megan McArdle, transforming her from failed Wall Street consultant to elite journalist. Finally Williamson came to rest at National Review, capping a career as conservative propaganda-fed veal, gavage courtesy of those super-rich, super-endowed, super-superior Ubermenschen that he is now so eager to praise.

Reassuring arch-patriarch — maybe one with enough sons and grandsons to form a pillaging band of marauders? Hillary Rodham Clinton told us that it takes a village, and Mitt Romney showed us how to populate a village with thriving offspring. Newsweek, which as of this writing is still in business, recently ran a cover photo of Romney with the headline: “The Wimp Factor: Is He Just Too Insecure to Be President?” Look at his fat stacks. Look at that mess of sons and grandchildren. Look at a picture of Ann Romney on her wedding day and that cocky smirk on his face. What exactly has Mitt Romney got to be insecure about? That he’s not as prodigious a patriarch as Ramses II or as rich as >Lakshmi Mittal? I bet he sleeps at night and never worries about that. He has done everything right in life, and he should own it. And by own it, I mean put it on the black card and stow it in the G6 — or at least in first class, for Pete’s sake.

Yes, Mr. Williamson is telling Romney to throw his money and power in the faces of the shrinking middle class and flaunt his large Mormon family, which should be polygamous because Romney's just that fabulous. But, to be fair, this terrible advice would work just fine if all the other authoritarians are just as blindly worshipful of Mittens' masculinity as Mr. Williamson.

In a manly way, of course. He's a Republican!

The Smartest Girl In The Dorm

Poor Megan McArdle tries to pull her "Smartest Girl In The Dorm" act but flops miserably. And her "Wide-Eyed Innocent" act isn't working anymore either.

Bless her heart.

From the comments on a post at Outside The Beltway:

Megan McArdle says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 15:17

I think the attempt to draw a distinction between “legitimate rape” and illegitimate rape is loony, but IIRC, there was a study a few years ago that showed lower-than-expected conceptions from rape, indicating that women’s bodies might have some mechanism for shutting down unwanted conceptions. HOWEVER, even if I’m remembering right, it was one study, and it certainly didn’t show that no woman ever conceived after rape–just that they conceived at somewhat lower rates than you’d expect.

By offering "facts" that appear to support Todd Akin's stupidity, McArdle is supporting Todd Akin's stupidity. She does not seem to realize this; McArdle seems to think she is being an intellectual leader and is just correcting those silly liberals' criticisms of Akin. It's leadership like this that brought her to the attention of that bastion of excellence we call Newsweek.

Doug Mataconis says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 15:28

@Megan McArdle:
There may be any number of reasons for that, including the possibility that the perpetrator doesn’t necessarily, umm, finish the job. A friend who is an MD saw this today and told me there’s simple no medical evidence to support what he said notwithstanding the statistical oddity.
And, then there’s the question of what the heck he means by “legitimate rape”

rudderpedals says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 15:52

@Megan McArdle:

IIRC, there was a study

Link please or I’m calling shenanigans on the study.

McArdle's reputation precedes her.

Rick Almeida says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 16:04

@Megan McArdle:
Megan McArdle – on hiatus, but still making things up.

Kathy Kattenburg says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 16:30

And another face palm for Megan McArdle!

DRS says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 16:36

Please tell me this isn’t the “real” Atlantic Monthly Megan McArdle. That one is bad enough but she can’t be this bad, surely?

Oh ye of little faith.

Commonist says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 16:52

@Megan McArdle:
HOW CAN YOUR BODY NOT REJECT YOUR SOUL THE WAY IT REJECTS FOREIGN OBJECTS.

Heh.

A discussion ensues in which a commenter states that (s)he doesn't understand the animus against McArdle. "Are we liberals supposed to run away from science if it shows things that might require an extra sentence or two of explanation when we have an argument?" he or she wonders, the better to help his or her fellow liberals overcome their ideological biases and embrace science, which we all know is factual and therefore liberal, even when it is, um, hypothetical. Mr. Mataconis steps in to call the commenters to order, the commenters ask why Mr. Mataconis seems to have Megan-Only rules for internet conduct, and a good time is had by all except Mr. Mataconis. And the commentariat remains unconvinced.

Commonist says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 17:41

@Tano:
Because absolutely every single thing McMegan has ever written signals an absolutely fascinating contempt for facts, coupled with an unfailing disdain for the weak and admiration of the exploiters of the weak that is impressive even for a libertarian? She’s the urtype of the sort of bourgeois, self-compassionate, politically uncommitted yet consistently biased “commentator” that manages to be even worse than the republicans they refuse to call out for what they are. She is a nullity.
Whatever you do, don’t assume she is showing good faith or actually have read up on what she’s talking about.

Of course, when one is discussing a McFact one should always check that fact first.

MM says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 18:50

Megan McArdle is wrong. In fact it is more likely that a woman will get pregnant from a rape than from consensual sex.
Linky
Linky

legion says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 18:56

Well, when I go to all the trouble of typing “rapist pregnancy study” into the finely-honed journalistic tool known as “The Google”, the first result is now about Akin, but the very next result is a 1996 study on rape-related pregnancies, which ends with this:

CONCLUSIONS:
Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.

rather directly contradicting Akin’s disgraceful idiocy. Although I suspect Megan is thinking specifically of a study I too recall from maybe a year ago (which I have had more trouble searching for) that specifically studied rapists and found that some significant percentage of them, when actually engaging in “the act” became physically unable to continue to orgasm; hypothetically because the reality of the rape was rather less satisfying than the fantasy in the rapist’s head. However, this has exactly nothing to do with the victim’s desires in the matter of rape and/or pregnancy…

Does she still feel smarter than both liberals and conservatives now?

Little Lord Bootstraps

Let's see what Little Lord Bootstraps, the man who managed to give birth to himself, educate himself, and rise to power purely on courage and pluck without any help whatsoever, is up to.

Paul Krugman:

Ryanomics is and always has been a con game, although to be fair, it has become even more of a con since Mr. [Paul] Ryan joined the ticket.

...

...[I]f we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars.  

Yet Mr. Ryan claims to be a deficit hawk. What’s the basis for that claim?

      

Well, he says that he would offset his tax cuts by “base broadening,” eliminating enough tax deductions to make up the lost revenue. Which deductions would he eliminate? He refuses to say — and realistically, revenue gain on the scale he claims would be virtually impossible.         

At the same time, he asserts that he would make huge further cuts in spending. What would he cut? He refuses to say.

      

What Mr. Ryan actually offers, then, are specific proposals that would sharply increase the deficit, plus an assertion that he has secret tax and spending plans that he refuses to share with us, but which will turn his overall plan into deficit reduction.

      

If this sounds like a joke, that’s because it is.

Lyin' Ryan is like every other libertarian, long on theory and lies about the wonder of removing government assistance to the lower classes while increasing government assistance to the upper classes. It's their world and we just live in it. Why should the little people get something for free when the rich have worked so long and hard for everything they have?

For instance, we all know how young Paul Ryan worked at menial jobs to support himself after his father died suddenly. This is admirable, of course, but Ryan's entire professional career has been political, concentrating on fantasy-based supply-side economics and developing close ties with the Koches and their allies.

Betty Ryan reportedly urged her son to accept a congressional position as a staff economist attached to Kasten's office, which he did after graduating in 1992.^[26][39] In his early years working on Capitol Hill, Ryan supplemented his income by working as a waiter, as a fitness trainer and at various other side jobs.^[16][28]

A few months after Kasten was defeated by Democrat Russ Feingold in the 1992 election, Ryan became a speechwriter for Empower America (now FreedomWorks), a conservative advocacy group founded by Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett.^[16][40][41]

And that was the end of menial jobs for Ryan. He worked for Kemp and Sam Brownback, and when those jobs ended he fell back on his large and successful family for assistance, who gave him a job in marketing. In 1992 1998 he was elected to the House of Representatives for the first time. While there he developed "close ties" with libertarians and the Koches.

When Mr. Romney announced that Mr. Ryan would be his running mate, his campaign emphasized the congressman’s detailed knowledge of the federal budget and his chemistry with Mr. Romney. Less well-known are Mr. Ryan’s close ties to the donors and activists who have channeled Tea Party anger into a $400 million political machine, financed by a network of conservative and libertarian donors that now rivals, and occasionally challenges, the Republican establishment behind Mr. Romney.
      

Mr. Ryan is one of a very few elected officials who have attended the Kochs’ biannual conferences, where wealthy donors sit in on seminars on runaway government spending and the myths of climate change.

      

He is on first-name terms with prominent libertarians in the financial world, including hedge fund billionaires like Cliff Asness and Paul Singer, and spent his formative years immersed in the Republican Party’s supply-side wing, working for lawmakers and conservative policy advocates like Jack Kemp.

      

He has appeared for years at rallies, town hall meetings, and donor briefings for groups like the Club for Growth, which spends millions to defeat Republicans deemed squishy on taxes and spending, and Americans for Prosperity, a grass-roots group focused on economic and budget issues that is now trying to channel Tea Party energy into a permanent electoral force. Its fourth chapter was founded in Mr. Ryan’s home state, Wisconsin.

Now Mr. Ryan could provide Mr. Romney with a critical political and intellectual bridge to the rising conservative counterestablishment represented by the Kochs and their allies, who are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and deploy thousands of volunteers to defeat Mr. Obama. Should Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan win in November, a constituency that has for years fulminated against the failure of Republicans to live up to their own principles could soon have a close — and powerful — friend in the White House.

No wonder Megan McArdle favors Ryan. They both support obscenely wealthy libertarian sugar daddies who try to eliminate government regulation and taxes by lying about economics.

Libertarian Rex

Image from here.

ABC tells us:

After repeated denials, Paul Ryan has admitted he requested stimulus cash even after sharply criticizing the program.

[Ryan] “Regardless, it’s clear that the Obama stimulus did nothing to stimulate the economy, and now the President is asking to do it all over again.”

What does that remind me of...?

This is all technically true, and collectively nonsense. [re Matt Taibbi's article on Goldman, Sachs]
...

Or perhaps a better way to say it is that the facts are right, but the mini narratives are ludicrously wrong, which makes the meta narrative suspect.

Paul Ryan and Megan McArdle: sisters under the skin. Both so deep in denial to protect their fantasy world in which they are leaders and intellectuals that reality and truth don't even make them pause, and both seeming to expect everyone else to join along willingly.

But the right needs a a comforting Daddy-figure in these dangerous and impoverished times, not the political equivalent of Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute in The Oval Office.


ADDED: From the Washington Post:

Mitt Romney’s advisers are orchestrating a four-day Republican National Convention that is not so much designed to make Americans fall in love with the nominee, but rather to fall in like with the idea of him as the nation’s leader and a uniquely qualified businessman who can fix the economy.

The decision to focus heavily on Romney’s career background and economic policies is a departure from most conventions, which tend to mainly try to build a personal connection between the candidate and voters, especially for first-time nominees. It is also a tacit acknowledgment that Romney cannot win over enough swing voters by highlighting his personality and telling his life story alone.

Republicans are  going to demand that everyone obey their authorities and vote for the Mormon stiff and the Catholic brown-noser. Their followers will do it but their pain will be amusing palpable.

You Have To Be Kidding Me

You can try to stay away from Megan McArdle, for your own mental health if nothing else, but fate conspires against you constantly. She is absolutely incredible. She has utterly no sense of self-awareness and no shame.