I’ll Take Godwin for $1,000: Wisconsin Rule of Law Edition*

Via TPM, we find that Wisconsin Judge Maryann Sumi (echoing a commenter here, what a great name for a judge) has again enjoined the state of Wisconsin from implementing the union busting law passed in dubious battle last month.

Based on the following, I’m guessing she’s seriously pissed (a legal term of art, you know):

Apparently that language was either misunderstood or ignored, but what I said was the further implementation of Act 10 was enjoined. That is what I now want to make crystal clear…

adding that

Now that I’ve made my earlier order as clear as it possibly can be, I must state that those who act in open and willful defiance of the court order place not only themselves at peril of sanctions, they also jeopardize the financial and the governmental stability of the state of Wisconsin.

Most sentient puddles would conclude that perhaps they should obey the court’s order until the substantive issues had been fully litigated.  Governor Walker and his henchmen do not share that conviction:

But minutes later, outside the court room, Assistant Attorney General Steven Means said the legislation “absolutely” is still in effect.

Please note that the speaker quoted there is an Asst. Attorney General. As in a lawyer.  As in an officer of the court.

So, I guess this is the time to go all Godwin.  It is important to remember that authoritarians almost always use the simulacrum of law to provide a tattered aura of legitimacy for their lawless exercise of power.  Hitler did certainly; his critical powers derived from  grants by the Reichstag.

Please note:  I am not saying Wisconsin is going the way of Berlin, c. 1933.  I am saying that the disdain for the ordinary structure of governance and law is how people behave when democracy is an accessory, and not essential to the entire idea of legitimate authority.  Courts are convenient to such folks when complaisant, and superfluous if not.

To be sure, Walker is a pissant way out of his depth, but as many others have noted, he’s important precisely because he is so overt and obvious in his anti-democratic hatred of that messy business of governing.  He lets us see plainly what his slicker and more sophisticated co-conspirators plan to do:  achieve ends that could not command popular support on their own by any means necessary.

For that, I suppose we should be grateful to the claque of clumsy thugs now in power in Wisconsin.  They are showing us what lurks below the hood of the Republican machine. And so I’ll say to all those right bloggers who maunder on about Obamacare or the Libyan attacks or birth certificates or whatever, if you wish to invoke the words “rule of law” you better have something to say here.

Gotta give them time, I guess, but my bet is on crickets.

Image:  Lucas Cranach Allegory of Justice, 1537

*By the way.  I do know I’ve been conspicuous (as in, unnoticed) by my absence lately.  There have been two reasons.  The first is a press of work so insane that I have ended each day by curling up with a scotch bottle for the five spare minutes alotted me between unconsciousness and panic.

The second is that I occasionally have these funks brought on by the sheer catastrophe of the world.  Sometimes, the accumulation of stupidity, misery, disaster and sheer capricious accident/horror leaves me gobsmacked for something to say.

It’s been that way lately, and I cannot say how much I admire, for example, the front pagers and commentariat here who sustain articulate smarts and anger despite the evident awfulness of existence.  But I’m better now (though still wrecked by an insatiable inbox), so expect more Hitler references and baroque painting on a semi-regular basis.

You have been warned.

I Hope Erick Erickson Lives A Long and Miserable Life Afflicted By At Least Six of the Ten Plaugues*

Cross posted at Balloon Juice

I’m working on a longer post on the question of causation, madness and murder, but I have to stop that for a moment of sheer rage.

Y’all know that I’m a bit squeamish in my language here — the way I write f**k and all that — but let me drop that reticence for just this once and say that I hope that notorious goatbuggering cretin, Erick Erickson, suffers every possible anguish reserved for those who see the suffering of others as evidence of their god’s love for them.  Fuck him.  Fuck him with a rusty hatchet.

Why say I so?

Because he had the wretched cruelty to write:

Through it all though, well meaning people on both sides of the ideological and partisan divide are not talking about the one thing that should be talked about — a saving faith in Jesus Christ.

(h/t Media Matters)

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Just marvel first at the gutshredding stupidity of this — I mean, I know that Erickson is an imbecile, but surely even a man of his grotesquely limited capacities could recognize the problem of evil when, as in his own words, it steps up and whomps him upside the head?

Yup, sure, that’s my first thought:  kill a nine year old girl; shoot some nice lady through the left hemisphere, murder a judge, and the proper response is to reflect on just how much that Jewish love child Jesus has done for me lately.

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In Jewish ritual, Shiva, the seven days after a funeral, is woven through with ritual and practices that center on leading those who have just lost someone through the most wrenching experiences of sorrow.  Among the traditions: those who would offer comfort a loss are enjoined to let the bereaved speak first — or not — and only when the mourner does should they respond, following the lead those who have suffered the lost give them.  There’s a reason for that: it’s so that gutless, self-absorbed, miserable excuses for humanity like Erickson don’t drop their trousers and beshit a house of bereavement.

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In that light, what kind of shitheel tells those who have just lost all-in-all in this world that they should make (or should have made)  nice with jeezus and all would have been/will be well. Especially when the best known  victim, Gabrielle Giffords, is in fact Jewish.

SATSQ:  Shitheels like Erick Erickson.

Worse yet — he doubled down.

I mean, I  don’t think it takes a huge dollop of cultural sensitivity to realize that Jews — even or especially those, like me, drifting into committedly Jewish atheism, would find it both risible and hateful to be told to bow down to Jesus or go to hell.

Seriously.  He goes there:

…here is the reality: beyond us is a world we cannot see with our eyes. It impacts us on a daily basis. It is a world of very real angels and very real demons. It is a world of a very real God and a very real Satan, a very real Heaven and a very real Hell.

…And, frankly, at times like this I am more and more mindful of the great chasm in this world between the saved and damned.

To which I say that were there an Inferno, it would reserve a special place for one who says to those who have suffered and those who have lost all in all in this world that if they don’t make nice to his plastic jeezus they must suffer eternal torment.

As those struck by the Arizona tragedy already know, there is indeed a hell.  It exists in this world, and we sorrow for those cast into it through no ill-deed of their own.  Those who have true kindness in them — the saving grace of human mercy — will do what they can to ease the misery of those who have suffered so.  That worthless waste of sperm that is Erick Erickson would rather rub salt in the wounds.

Civilized people would shun the Ericksons of the world.  CNN has a choice.  For now, I make mine.  Til he goes, I withhold my eyes — from the channel, the website, the whole shooting match.

*Details here. I personally favor numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, 8 and 9, but YMMV.  Note the key point though:  I do not wish that Erick Erickson should die.  I do not seek to wreak violence upon his person.  Divine judgment, baby.  That’s all.

Images:  Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1612

Hans Memling, The Last Judgment, triptych, right wing (inner): Casting the Damned into Hell, 1467-1471

A Nation of Secrets

(Cross posted at Balloon Juice)

So, Wikileaks tells us that Arab nations don’t like Iran very much.  That Qadhafi likes blondes. That Putin and Berlusconi don’t mind stacking up some green together.  There is more serious stuff there too, of course, (e.g. Red Crescent gun running; North Korea/Iran putting the ballistic missile evil in that “axis of evil” stuff) and no doubt, more to come.

I’m hearing the arguments we all could predict.  Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, has written of his view that the global dump of diplomatic secrets is (a) dangerous to individual lives and to teh project of making sound policy in a dangeraous works (b) so indiscriminate that it can’t be seen as attempt to bring transparency on specific government misdeeds being covered up. Rather, Sanger argues, this is what enemies of the United States do, in what seems to him to be a transparant assault on US capacity to do anything for good in the world.

Josh Marshall, less explosively, says something similar, writing

I don’t recognize what Wikileaks is doing here as some righteous act of government transparency. It’s more like an attack, albeit one with consequences which can easily be overstated.

Me — I think “attack” is one of those words that’s easier to write than to defend.  My impression, supported by only one quick conversation with someone with actual experience in the national security apparatus, is that this is less an attack than relatively harmless vandalism — but that’s not a position I can defend with any vigor.  I just don’t know.

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But what I do know is that this leak is a reminder of what it means to live in a national security state.  Not in the sense that these particular documents impinge on my civil liberties or yours.  Rather, it’s the combination of sheer volume — that quarter-of-a-million cables number — and the banality of so much of what’s come to light so far.  (I guess I’m glad to know that “nurse” is a euphemism in Libya too…but still.)

We live enmeshed in secrets.  The Harvard historian of science Peter Galison has been digging into the empire of unknowing that our government now rules, and I just reread this remarkable paper, written all the way back in 2004.  Consider this:

The number of carefully archived pages written in the open is large. While hard to estimate, one could begin by taking the number of items on the shelves of the Library of Congress—one of the largest libraries in the world: 120 million items carrying about 7.5 billion pages, of which about 5.4 billion pages are in 18 million books…

…Some suspect as many as a trillion pages are classified (200 Libraries of Congress). That may be too many. 2001, for example, saw 33 million classification actions; assuming (with the experts) that there are roughly 10 pages per action, that would mean roughly 330 million pages were classified last year (about three times as many pages are now being classified as declassified). So the U.S. added a net 250 million classified pages last year. By comparison, the entire system of Harvard libraries—over a hundred of them—added about 220,000 volumes (about sixty million pages, a number not far from the acquisition rate at other comparably massive universal depositories such as the Library of Congress, the British Museum, or the New York Public Library). Contemplate these numbers: about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.

Galison in this piece focuses on the irrationality of the classification scheme, and it’s voraciousness.  Secrecy breeds secrecy; knowledge disappears from view on a data-level invocation of the one-drop rule.  Galison tells us that there aren’t that many people empowered to imprison information in the classification gulag:

…Just over 4000 for the whole of the United States—who bear the title of Original Classifiers. Only this initiated cadre can transform a document, idea, picture, shape, or device into the modal categories Top Secret, Secret, or Confidential. And of these 4132 or so Original Classifiers, only 999 (as of 2001) are authorized to stamp a document into the category Top Secret.

Those few people are the unmoved prime movers of the classified world—it is they who begin the tagging process that winds its way down the chain of derivative classification. For every document that subsequently refers to information in those originally classified gains the highest classification of the documents cited in it. Like the radio-tagging of a genetic mutant, the classified information bears its mark through all the subsequent generations of work issuing from it. More numbers: in 2001 there were 260,678 original classifications (acts that designated a body of work classified) and 32,760,209 derivative ones. A cascade of classification.

All this (and more — really, go read the whole thing) leads up to the point that returns us to the depressing glimpse of the way we live now produced by the Wikileaks dump. That would be Galison’s depiction of the actual impossibility of rational secrecy. What we get instead of security, he argues, is the dystopia Thomas Pynchon saw in The Crying of Lot 49:

…a universe so obsessed with concealment and conspiracy, with government and corporate monopoly control of information, that the causal structure and even the raw sequence of events hovered perpetually out of reach…Secret societies with private communication desperately tried to counter the monopoly on information—Pynchon’s world crawls with disaffected engineers trying to patent Maxwell’s demon, would-be suicides, and isolated lovers all seeking to break the out-of-control monopoly of knowledge transmission.

Galison has a number of targets in this piece.  But the biggest one, or at least that which resonated now as I read this essay again, is that once you set out down a road where each unknowable fact needs its hedge of other secrets to preserve the original wall of ignorance and so on…you end up in a position where it becomes impossible for the governed to give informed consent to their governors.

There is the obvious problem, of course:  bits of knowledge that disappear into the nothingness of the security apparatus, not because of any danger they pose, but because they impinge on the autonomy of the state.  Things that if we knew them we’d react badly to, the sweetheart deals or the unobservered f**k ups that it’s just easier (for some) if hoi polloi don’t know.

But those are probably the easy misdeeds to correct:  if the catastrophes are obvious enough, then there are threads to pull if we had more McClatchy’s and no Foxes on the job.  The deeper issue is that of the paternalistic state, one in which secrets are kept simply because everything runs so much more smoothly if we don’t know precisely what is being done, to and for whom.  Here’s Galison again:

In the end, however, the broadest problem is not merely that of the weapons laboratory, industry, or the university. It is that, if pressed too hard and too deeply, secrecy, measured in the staggering units of Libraries of Congress, is a threat to democracy. And that is not a problem to be resolved by an automated Original Classifier or declassifier. It is political at every scale from attempts to excise a single critical idea to the vain efforts to remove whole domains of knowledge.

That’s right, if unsatisfying. I see no sign that things will change soon; the national security state has too many layers of justification (many classified, of course, but trust us….) to suggest that the ratio of classification to declassification is going to change anytime soon.

Which, by the long road home, leads to Wikileaks.

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I understand the view that unfiltered dumps of classified documents about anything can be reckless, or worse.  But at the same time if Wikileaks did not exist, it would be invented.  When we make more secrets than knowledge we can share, that ever-growing Fort Knox of unknowing will inevitably draw its safe crackers.  And if we are horrified when those crackers actually steal something we care about, we might want to look again at how we decide how much we think it wise not to know ourselves.

Images:  James Jacques Joseph Tissot, “The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies,” c. 1896-1902.

Diego Velázquez, “Las Meninas,” 1656–1657.

Too Busy To Post, Too Enraged Not To Note The Latest Bit of Fraud/Nonsense–Mortgage Backed Securities/Foreclosure disaster edition

On multiple deadlines today, but I couldn’t resist this juxtaposition.

First, this, from two weeks ago (h/t LegalForesicAuditors.com):

NEW YORK — JPMorgan Chase has temporarily stopped foreclosing on more than 50,000 homes so it can review documents that might contain errors.

JPMorgan’s move Wednesday makes it the second major company to take such action this month, underscoring a growing legal problem. The issue could stall an already overloaded foreclosure process.

…..

JPMorgan acknowledged Wednesday that its employees signed some affidavits about loan documents without personally verifying the files. These affidavits verifies the accuracy of the loan information, including who owns the mortgage.

….

In some states, lenders can foreclose quickly on delinquent mortgage borrowers. But 20 states use a lengthy court process for foreclosures. They require documents to verify information on the mortgage, including who owns it. Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois are the biggest states with this process. 

Christopher Immel, a Florida lawyer who represents homeowners, said people who already have lost homes could sue their lender, alleging errors in documents.

In August, a judge in Duval County, Fla., ruled that JPMorgan could not foreclose on two homeowners. The reasoning was that Fannie Mae carried the mortgage on its books and JPMorgan Chase only collected payments on the loan. JPMorgan Chase had identified itself as the owner of the loan.

….

More lawsuits could come soon.

In May, JPMorgan employee Beth Ann Cottrell said in a deposition that she and her staff of eight signed about 18,000 legal documents a month without reviewing every file. In a similar testimony, GMAC employee Jeffrey Stephan said he signed 10,000 documents a month without personally verifying the mortgage information.

And then there’s this, hot of the intertubes via NYTimes.com:

JPMorgan Chase kicked off what was expected to be a mixed quarterly earnings season for big banks on Wednesday with a 23 percent increase in third-quarter income.

After powering ahead for the last year on the strength of its trading operations, JPMorgan topped investor expectations with the help of improvement in its credit card business and a gain from money it had previously set aside to cover possible losses from bad loans.

Net income rose to $4.42 billion, from $3.58 billion a year earlier. Earnings were a $1.01 a share, handily topping analyst forecasts for 88 cents. Earnings were 82 cents a share in the period a year ago.

The Times piece does note the fact that the bank faces significant costs and potential liability as it confronts the failure of its foreclosure process, and it quotes JPMorgan’s new CFO trying to discount the implications of this issue, saying “The whole mortgage issue costs us so much money now, to me it [the foreclosure SNAFU] is incremental.”

Just two quick thoughts:

1:  Given the different avenues through which JPMorgan is exposed to potential liability (as holder of delinquent loans, and through its role in the making of the market in mortgage backed securities affected by flawed documentaton — see this excellent series for more), the confidence expressed by the CFO in question, Mr. Douglas Braunstein, reminds me of this moment of assurance:

2:  What justification can anyone provide for the ongoing employment and wealth of the management of the major US banks/investment houses?

And to add just one more query in the spirit of honest curiousity:  what rationale is left for avoiding a modernized version of Glass-Seagall?  Commercial lending is a public utility, and needs to be both regulated and guaranteed as such.  Everything else can be at one’s own risk — but the two activities have to be kept separate, not just by alleged Chinese Walls, but institutionally, at the level of holding of capital and the existence of public insurance/guarantees.

Tell me, anyone, why this is wrong.

All of which is to say that before the Obama adminstration or Congress starts immunizing the big Wall St. firms from the consequences of what appears to be a decade of profiteering on real estate fraud, we gotta take the current structure down to the foundations.

Carthago Delenda Est.

Image:  Vincent van Gogh, “The Cottage,” 1885.

Marty Peretz is a Disgrace — To Civilized Company and to the Tradition He Purports to uphold.

Warning: no science, not much politics (directly) and some religion (even Bible!) below.  Enter at your own pleasure.

Even with my prior post, I am disgracefully late in weighing in on the ugly case of Marty Peretz.  I felt, as James Fallows originally did, that the appropriate response for civilized people was obvious, had been made, and needed no further comment.

Plus, I was just saddened by Peretz’s disgusting statement that prompted this latest examination of one of the worst people in American public life.  When he writes “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to other Muslims.’ This is a statement of fact, not value.”…what more is there to say?

This is, or ought to be, unforgivable speech, by which I mean not that Peretz doesn’t have the right to dispense it, but that a healthy society would condemn it so swiftly and so thoroughly that there could be no ambiguity about what we as a culture and a polity think.

All this is by now familiar to those who have chased Peretz’s malign vision through the blogs these last couple of weeks.  What strikes me now is the complete cluelessness — and worse, moral degeneracy — of Peretz’s attempts to place that vision in the context of Jewish religious practice.

Peretz has now made, by my count, two attempts to apologize.  The first was, let us say gently, less than persuasive. Not only did Peretz there reaffirm his conviction that Muslim life is, as a matter fact, of lower value than yours or mine, but as James Fallows notes, did not even seem able to take responsibility for the sins he did acknowledge. (See the remarks at the end of the linked post.)

That was pathetic.  Peretz’s second attempt was more interesting, and in the end, more infuriating, at least to me, with its cloaking of religious unction, and a fundamental misunderstanding (to put the best possible light on the matter) of the actual demands of the Jewish tradition.

Here’s what he said:

This is the eve of Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement. Introspection is the order of the day. The Jewish tradition divides sin into two categories, sins against God and sins against man, and insists that God can forgive the former but not the latter, because only the sinned against have the power to absolve the sin. This is why the asking of forgiveness is an act of supreme importance in this season. I myself have much to ask forgiveness for, and much of this asking will be done in private, as is appropriate. But there are sins that are committed in public, and in this past year I have publicly committed the sin of wild and wounding language, especially hurtful to our Muslim brothers and sisters. I do not console myself that many other Americans at this moment are committing the same transgressions, against others. I allowed emotion to run way ahead of reason, and feelings to trample arguments. For this I am sorry.

This sounds good, sort of, better at least than Peretz’s prior attempt.

But as he instructs his readers about the demands Jewish tradition places on its heirs, he makes a cardinal error or two. (Couldn’t resist that one.)

For one:  Peretz is correct that the asking of forgiveness is an essential act in the atonement required of Jews at this season.  But doing so, of course, requires an accurate understanding of the wrong committed.  Peretz asserts that his problem was one of language, of the words chosen out of emotion rather than reason.

It was that, of course, and more:  rating lives cheap is not simply mean; it is dangerous.  An apology for such a statement, at least as I see it, can’t confine itself to the “sticks and stones…” formula of saying one should have found better words to express oneself (or even that one should have thought better thoughts before consuming one’s Bruno Magli’s).

Rather, it has to encompass that actual jeopardy in which it puts real people.

That is:  Peretz didn’t just say he thought Muslims were hateful, bad as that would be as a blanket statement. Instead he flirted with declaring open season on a billion and half human beings.

But even had he gone to what the actual meaning is of his “wild” language (nice euphemism there, doncha think?) Peretz still failed to achieve the atonement to which he so piously aspired.

Why?

Because Judaism is a religion of works, not faith.  See, e.g. Micah.  All that is required to lead a good life is to…

…do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.  (Micah 6, v.9, in the King James translation)*

That is:  act well in the world, from within in a defined moral or ethical perspective (the justice/mercy dichotomy that recurs a lot in  Jewish writings, especially those connected with the Day of Atonement).

In that context, Peretz’s “atonement” is hollow, ineffectual, because he did not include all the required acts.  He apologized; he used a formula in words. He did not, and has not yet to my knowledge, gone the next, necessary step:  making good the damage done.

Don’t take my word for it, of course.  I am not a halachic Jew (far from it) and I am no religious scholar.  But the texts here are pretty clear.

For example  here’s one summary of Jewish traditional thought on repentence:

Repentance was the indispensable condition for all the various means of atonement. Repentance must unquestionably accompany a guilt or sin-offering (Lev. v. 5; Maimonides, “Yad,” Teshubah, i. 1). Penitent confession was a requisite for expiation through capital or corporal punishment (Sanh. vi. 2; Maimonides,ib.). “The Day of Atonement absolves from sins against God, but not from sins against a fellow man unless the pardon of the offended person be secured” (Yoma viii. 9). Hence the custom of terminating on the eve of the fastday all feuds and disputes (Yoma 87a; Maimonides,ib.ii.9et seq.)

Unpacking that:  repentence, regret, acknowledgement of the sin are all necessary. They are not sufficient.  A guilt offering (in the days of sacrifice), or, ever since the seventy first year of the common era,  the pardon of the offended persons, an acknowledgement of adequate redress, is required to make the combination of thought (repentence) and deed (the acts required to secure pardon) sufficient to secure atonement.

Peretz knows this.  Hell, if he goes to Yom Kippur services he hears it at least once a year in the most solemn of Jewish settings, when the time comes to read this passage from the Book of Isaiah:

Is it such a fast that I have chosen? A day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?  Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward.  (Isiah 58, v. 5-8, King James version.)

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not remind Peretz of just a little bit of scripture that bears directly on both his recent gaffes (remembering that a gaffe in his circles is the unintended revelation of what you really think) and on the spirit of the Day of Atonoment that he invoked. Isaiah is a rich and complicated book, and for all the furor and violence in some of the prophecy, there is a very clear view of a divinity not simply concerned with being the totem of a single people.  Therefore, it seems on point to remind Peretz of this passage:

be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance. (Isiah, 19, v. 23-25.)

Trust me.  For most of Isaiah, and most of Jewish scripture and traditional memory, Egypt and Assyria are not exactly personae gratae.  But here it is:  Egypt and Assyria and Israel, linked in the prophet’s testimony by the most intimate of bonds.

Peretz seems to have missed that part in Sunday school.

Enough.  This is, in some sense, insider baseball.  In any event, I’m not a person of faith; I’m not observant, and I’m certainly no scholar of Jewish texts and practice.  But if Peretz wishes to place his acts in the context of the tradition he and I share, then it seems to me that its worth checking the sources.

And having done so, here’s the bottom line:  Peretz’s talk of the requirements of atonement is a blind.  It is a distraction, a way to suggest that after all, he’s not such a bad guy, and that he has done what is required to repair the damage he has done.

He has not.

I wish him all success in his efforts to make things right with his divine judge.  As he notes, that’s a private conversation.

Beyond the bounds of that relationship, I hope that I commit no wrong to him or anyone when I say that this world, the one in which we all live and words are weapons, would be better served if he just shut up.**

*I use the King James version and not translations from Jewish sources because, it is such a mighty instrument.  The English language is a glorious noise, and one of its greatest sources is that rolling play of words and rhythm that is the King James Bible.  I can’t help it, but I love its sound more than that of the more accurate and more modern ones.  So there.

**And, yeah, I mean getting his paws off TNR. Pace Sully and the rest, I am not among those who think the discourse or journalism would suffer if TNR got quiet.  The reverse, rather, IMHO.

Images:  Vincent Van Gogh, “A Pair of Shoes” 1887.

Benjamin West, “Isaiah’s lips annointed with fire” before 1820.

Megan McArdle is Always Wrong: On So Many Axes It’s Hard To No Where To Start/Outsourced Edition.

Yes, this will be largely outsourced, but just to get everyone in the mood let me quote from the introduction to Andrew Bacevich’s important new book Washington Rules (about which I’ve been blogging a bit this week).

That introduction channels (and explicitly cites) Henry Adams on the subject of education, which in both men’s tellings tends to begin only when one discovers the capacity to break free of the fetters forged through years of imbibing truths too obvious to be examined.

As Bacevich quotes Adams, “Nothing is so astonishing in education as the amount of ignorance accumulates in the form of inert facts.”

That revelation prompted this next reflection.  I want to emphasize that the identification of it with Megan McArdle is all mine — Bacevich bears no responsibility for that specific connection.  But as I read his couple of sentences describing those who attempt to get ahead within the Washington establishment by showing existing powers how perfectly you can recite your lessons, it seemed to me to describe McArdle to a tee.

Bacevich writes that:

Adopting fashionable attitudes to demonstrate one’s trustworthiness — the world of politics is flush with such people hoping thereby to qualify for inclusion in some inner circle — is akin to engaging in prostitution in exchange for promissory notes.  It’s not only demeaning but downright foolhardy.

Bacevich is a better man than I am: he writes to warn, to educate.

I don’t, at least not here.

I think Megan McArdle is past instruction.  She has made her petty-Faustian deal with the the little Lucifers of DC, and it is my bet that when the bill comes due, it will be far too late for any education to have effect.

Which leads me to today’s update in the Always Wrong™ chronicles.  This one belongs almost entirely to Susan of Texas, the stalwart at The Hunting of the Snark who has more stamina than I will ever have in documenting the case study in the death of American journalism that is the Business and Economics Editor of the Atlantic (sic!). (h/t TBogg).

Basically, McArdle links to a post citing an anonymous source accusing HHS Secretary Sebelius and the Obama administration of silencing a critic — a health insurance company — through the threat of regulatory retaliation.

Astute readers would (and did in McArdle’s comment thread) smell the obvious rat.  McArdle has long since demonstrated that she will say anything, no matter how risible, to defend her required position that the health care bill is an abomination (i.e. required by her overlords. See “promissary notes,” above).

So it comes as no surprise that she would leap at the attempt to advance the radical right-meme that government regulation = government jackboots at the door of innocent corporate citizens.  But given the convenience with which this post supports the pre-existing narrative, those who are familiar with her work know that one’s must needs check each claim.

Which her commenters do, admirably, and which Susan O’T meticulously chronicles. Go read Susan’s work — it’s fun.  Here I’ll just give you the short form, and one thought (all I got left on a busy Friday morning.)

Shorter:  McArdle takes another writer’s claims based on a “vetted” anonymous tip that a health insurance company has been silenced by a “gag order” issued by the  government.  Turns out (a) the “threat” was a widely publicized letter Secretary Sebelius sent to the head of the health insurance lobbying organization saying, in effect, that as the law requires, that insurers will be subject to regulatory review of potentially unjustified premium increases, and if that review returns confirmation, sanctions will follow.  To which she added the warning that falsely claiming that the new health care law drove the increases would not turn an unjustified increase into a justified one.

Now, you might not like it when a regulator in your business says the regulations apply to you, but McArdle had a great deal of difficulty explaining to her comment thread how this was a gag order — and in particular how this bore, at all, on her imputation that the administration was trying to suppress political speech (“dissent” in her grubby appropriation of a word whose associations with the to-her foreign concept of courage she seeks to steal).  Basically, she just made that bit up.

Actually, McArdle more or less told her readers right up front that she was doing so.  Susan noted that McArdle’s discussion of the so-called gag order began with this phrase:  ”Whatever the facts….”

My FSM!  She might as well have taken out an ad in Variety to shout that this was all bullsh*t.

I’m sure no one reading this will be surprised to learn that the facts aren’t with her.

The health insurer in question, when finally contacted by the initial poster denied the existence of the gag order.  That blogger excused his error by saying that it seemed likely to him that the adminstration might threaten someone, and that if they had, and succeeded, the gag order would have prevented the company from telling him so. Sic.

McArdle ultimately updated her post to reflect this fact, after being contacted directly by the company in question.  She added this remark:

I shouldn’t have linked the HCSC situation to Sebelius’ letter, which I’ve been meaning to write about for days; I took the words “gag order” to mean something they didn’t, for which I apologize.

Uhhh…”I took the words “gag order” to mean something they didn’t?”

Is is it just me or is she telling us here that she is functionally illiterate?

How many other things can those words mean than the one we all assumed she was talking about: that someone with power uttered a command to someone else to shut up?

Of course, this is really just word salad, the one dish I know that McArdle knows how to whip up.

Her problem was that she committed a fundamental journalistic sin in a journalistic setting.  She got something big wrong, and even admits, within the body of the piece, that she didn’t even try to get it right.

Remember: McArdle accused the Obama administration of doing something very bad that it did not do.   She used words like “creepy” and  ”thuggish” to describe this alleged exercise of totalitarian power.  There is nothing here that turns on a misunderstanding of the phrase “gag order.”

Instead what you see McArdle doing is to mask this great sin with a lessor one: I’m sorry, dude, but I just didn’t understand the vocabulary.  And the dog ate my homework.  And I was kinda right anyway.

To put it another way:  honest folk don’t have to make such excuses.

Last (hell of a shorter–ed.):  Whatever else happens, remember that Megan McArdle is not a journalist.  She is a shill.  A journalist would, affirmatively, actually report on claims before publishing them.

They’d ask. They would, at a minimum, read something as brief as a letter with some attention and care.

(Again, I’m just gobsmacked by that “I took the words…to mean” line.  Bluntly — if you can’t read declarative sentences in plain English with reasonable comprehension, then journalism is the wrong trade for you.)

Negatively, of course, “journalists” who routinely get basic facts in their stories wrong get fired.

If The Atlantic were even vaguely serious about its own reputation as an elite journal, it would react to the damage that McArdle daily does to the reputation of that publication and all who publish there, even those who are truly excellent writers and thinkers (thinking of you, James Fallows and TNC).

Again, there’s a simpler way to put it:  someone who can write — and not quail at pressing the upload button — the phrase, “whatever the facts”…

…is unworthy of your trust.

Image:  ”Chiron instructs young Achilles,” fresco from Herculaneum.

Andrew Bacevich and Me On Tea Parties: Fringe Ephemera, or Brown Shirts Looking for their Couturier

Yesterday I attended a fascinating, depressing talk by Andrew Bacevich (live blogged!) in which he discussed the way the Washington consensus on national security is (a) disastrous and (b) perpetuates itself by trading on the myth of Washingtonian competence and the willingness of those beyond the beltway to defer to the presumed superior expertise and access to hidden information of the national security elite.

He made a powerful case, fleshed out in his new book, Washington Rules, positing that American national security thinking (such as it is) rests on two poles. First there is a “credo”:  that “the US and the US alone should lead, save, liberate, transform the world.” (Bacevich added yesterday that his choice of verbs was deliberate — they are all those used by American policymakers.) And then there is his trinity  – the idea that the US should maintain a global military presence, configured for power projection, and used for that purpose as needed.  (And yes, Bacevich at one point did refer to his atavistic commitment to the Catholic Church of his raising, as if you couldn’t tell…;)

Go check out the live blog if you want more, or better, buy his book.  My focus here is on an answer he gave to a question late in the session, on what he made of the meaning of the rise of Tea Party.  Here, as close to a transcript as I could make it, is his answer:

My bet is that the Tea Party is an epiphenomenon. Despite all the hooptedoo (sic) and the expectations that the Tea Party will have an impact on the elections this November — don’t think that they will be around much longer .  The substance is so thin, and is so based on anger that it isn’t enough to sustain a lasting organization.

I think that’s right…

…but not all that long ago I spent a number of years immersed in the history of 1920s Germany as I was writing Einstein in Berlin.  The book was, as advertised, an account of Einstein’s years in Germany’s capital — 1914-1932, but the question I was really trying to understand was how the 20th century went to hell, using Einstein as my witness at the epicenter of the disaster.

So when Bacevich argued that mere rage and the vague and incoherent sensation that the aggrieved Tea Partiers have somehow been done dirt is not enough to propel a political movement to lasting impact, it immediately reminded me of this:

Asked in December of 1930 what to make of the new force in German politics, he [Einstein] answered that  “I do not enjoy Herr Hitler’s acquaintance.  He is living on the empty stomach of Germany.  As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important.” Initially, he felt that no action at all would be needed to bring Hitler low.  He reaffirmed for a Jewish organization that the “momentarily desperate economic situation” and the chronic “childish disease of the Republic” were to blame for the Nazi success. “Solidarity of the Jews, I believe, is always called for,” he wrote, “but any special reaction to the election results would be quite inappropriate.”

We know how that turned out — but rather than just make the facile juxtaposition, I’d add that Einstein was almost right, or should have been right.

There was nothing in 1930 to suggest that Hitler was more than just one more raving rightist whom the establishment would dismiss as soon as conditions improved even slightly.  And in fact, through 1930 up to the end of 1932 there remained (IMHO) nothing inevitable about Hitler’s rise to power.  He benefitted from all kinds of chance circumstances, all the while riding (skillfully) the larger and overt waves of economic dislocation and political crisis.  He was certainly helped by the incompetence of his opponents.

But, certainly, even if the attempt to draw exact parallels across historical space and time never work, the lesson of end-stage Weimar Germany is that it is surprisingly easy in moments of crisis for seemingly fringe movements to rise — and that in their ascent, to seize power that could never be theirs in any ordinary time.  And once seized, authority feeds itself — we don’t need to Godwinize the argument to see that; the rapid accumulation of state power by the minority Bush II administration offers plenty of object demonstrations of what happens once folks, however thin or nonexistent their mandate, get their hands on the mechanical levers of power.

All of which is to say I believe we should not wait for the ordinary flow of events to sweep the Tea Party from the stage.  Active opposition is what’s needed, rather than the passive certainty that they’re crazy, wrong, and so openly whacked out that no one could possibly actually hand them the keys to the car.

Above all, what the example of the rise of the Nazis tells us is that rage is enormously powerful, and real hardship combined with a sense of class or race or identity-based grievance is yet more potent.  Tea Partiers, on all the evidence do believe that something has been stolen from them, and plenty of them, including one running for the United States Senate in the state of Nevada (with a reasonable shot at getting in) have suggested that violence to retrieve their God-given right to rule is acceptable, perhaps required.

Bacevich did speak to that as well.  Despite his sense (wrong, in my view) of the minor, temporary danger posed by the rise of the nativist, crazed right, he still  painted a picture of establishment GOPers as analogues (my interpretation) to the elite bosses of the German right:

You may have heard Trent Lott the other day — “We need to co-opt these people.”  And I think that reflects the cynicism of the Republican party –but the GOP is not going to become the Tea Party.

Recall the former Chancellor of Germany, Franz von Papen, crowing at the deal that brought him the Vice Chancellorship to Hitler’s ascension to the top spot in a short lived coalition, replying to charges that he had been had: “You are mistaken.  We have hired him.”

Oops.  Whatever else happens, I think Mike Castle would beg to differ with Mr. Lott.

Just one more thing:  I agree entirely with Bacevich when he said this:  ty ’20s:

You can’t divorce subject of race from all of this — and it is the most troubling part of our current politics.  It seems to me that too many of our fellow citizens refuse to accept the legitimacy of this presidency because it is unacceptable to have a black man as President.  Republicans would deny this, but I think they are lying through their teeth.  Race has not been left in our rear view mirror.

Well, yes.

And if we needed any more glances in the 1930s rearview mirror, then I’d suggest that we have a pretty good idea why in times of crisis demagogues go out of their way to paint as less than properly human a minority group that historically has been corralled into segregated settlements and has been both disdained and feared (by majorities wielding disproportionately more power than their scapegoats) — and we have more than just one precedent of what can happen when they do.

Bacevich bets that the Tea Party cocktail of rage, entitlement, ignorance, viciousness and the studied, cynical attempts at co-option will evaporate as times get less fraught.  I look at the next few months, and think of the three elections of 1932 in Germany, and wonder…if enough of the madness slips into Senate and House seats this fall, how sure can we be the rump of the GOP won’t follow?  And if times remain as hard as they may well through 2012?

Do you feel lucky today?

Well, do you?

I don’t.  I’m finally waking up; my personal enthusiasm gap has closed — I’ve hit the “donate” button three or four times today, and as the election gets closer, I’ll be heading up to New Hampshire to see what I can do to help Paul Hodes get over the hump.  I urge you all to act similarly as your wallets and geography permit.

Images:  Albert Einstein in 1929, playing a benefit concert in a synagogue in support of the Berlin Jewish community.  This is the only photograph I’ve been able to find (and I’ve looked) showing Einstein wearing a yarmulke.

Francisco de Goya, “Courtyard with Lunatics,” 1794

PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

What John Cole said.

Google bombing run to commence in 3…2…1…

Now.

Seriously — I’ve got an acct. w. Paypal, and while they have not done to me what they have done to John (memo to self — no debit cards from companies whose offices I can’t walk into), I smell the grasping hand for that last little bit of float in every transaction I make with them.

Image:  Guy Pène du Bois, ”The Confidence Man,” c. 1919.

How Hard Are Fractions, Really: Elizabeth Warren Scares Her/Megan McArdle Is Always Wrong Chronicles, Cont’d.

Update: some edits to make the post read like someone without a grudge against English syntax wrote this post. Nothing substantive — a couple of cuts, a couple of verbs supplied to verbless “sentences.”

I guess I just can’t quit that Ms. McArdle.

I vowed to give myself a break from looking at the work of someone who seems to me to be trying to live up to fitness report number 12 on this list (or perhaps, better, number 4…oh hell, actually, a whole bunch of them).*

But then I read on, and I can’t help myself.

In my last post on this subject, I compared elements of her hatchet job on Warren to the techniques Andrew Breitbart uses in his war on progressives, Obama, and random African Americans who drift into his sights.

This time, it’s a little different:  McArdle is here simply trying to confuse the issue, apparently in the hopes that each bit of noise and nonsense that she can generate around Elizabeth Warren will damage her chances to become the first director of the he new Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  It’s an example of what I’ve called in the past McArdle’s monkey-in-the-zoo approach, in which she flings anything that comes to hand against the wall and hopes some fraction of it will stick..

To recap McArdle has promised the world a second part to that first post that attracted much uncomplimentary attention, but, as Susan of Texas notes it’s been a while.  In the meantime, she has outsourced the task, excerpting a Wall St. Journal op-ed of some years ago, which she presents under the title, “More Weird Metrics for Elizabeth Warren.”

What is so weird to McArdle?

Expressing tax liabilities as percentages of income.

No, really.

As in:  a single-earner family with an income of $38,700 facing a tax burden that claims 24% of that total.

As in: a two-earner family with earnings of $67,800 facing a tax burden of 33%.

Stating tax bills in this manner is apparently a dreadful sin, a willingness to mislead or a confusion about the underlying data.

Or so says the WSJ item’s author, Todd Zywicki, who in the passage quoted by McArdle complains that Elizabeth Warren and her co-author Amelia Warren Tyagi express certain items in raw dollar terms — $5,140 on car expenses for the single earner example, for example, vs. $8,000 in the two income family — but state tax liabilities only as percentages.

To Zywicki, this amounts to an obvious attempt to confound “an “apples to apples” comparison of all expenses.”

He corrects this, in his mind, by performing what he seems to regard as the utterly impenetrable magic act of performing two calculations:  .24*38,700 and .33*67,800, to yield dollar figures for the tax bills the two families in these examples owed.**

But beyond this en passant swipe at the eternal mystery that is the Wall St. Journal op-ed operation, our real concern here is McArdle.

She too, apparently, finds expressing a quantity as percentage of another, specified quantity, somehow suspect, a “weird metric.”

More, she regards this example as somehow dispositive of a systematic misuse of data, a demonstration of either Warren’s incompetence or her dishonesty.  McArdle writes,

Does it matter if we have a regulator who can use data consistently?  A lot of commenters seem angry that I would suggest it might.  As for me, I don’t know which is worse:  the notion that Elizabeth Warren understood what she was doing, or the notion that she didn’t.

My question would be, were I the publisher of The Atlantic, does it matter if we have an economics writer who can, apparently, neither read nor count?

Now that’s harsh, and I know it, but look at what happens if you read Warren’s and Tyagi’s examples in good faith, with a view to understanding what they are actually trying to say.

Well, long ago I wrote about the importance of such simple calculations as percentages to raw data in the context of Iraq War casualties.

The point there was that doing so allowed one to make comparisons across disparate bodies of data or historical examples.  If you want to understand the implications of  600,000 casualties among Iraqis, it helps to express that as a percentage of the population affected, which then allows you to compare it to, say, the deaths suffered by combatant nations in World War I or the American Civil War.  Thinking about the comparisons those enabled provided the frame for the moral of that post:  that the application of even veryy simple arithmetical/mathematical ideas to the raw experience of the world can prove enormously useful.

So, what might persuade Warren and Tyagi to present housing expenses or car costs as dollar numbers but  tax burdens as percentages?

Well, if I were to guess, it would be to make a point central to their larger argument:  that there are systematic increases in costs that accompany the increase in earnings in as you move from one income to two — but that different kinds of cost increases behave differently, have different scales of impact on the outcome for a two-earner family.

That is — increase in car costs like most family expenditures are basically linear:  if you go from one car to two, you pay a bit more in payments, insurance, and maintence, and that’s it.  If you take on a larger mortgage, the same applies and so on.  As Zywicki notes, apparently with some sense of being deceived, this results in such costs consuming a smaller percentage of the gross family income for two-earner households compared with single earner ones.***

Update:   note commenter Jim Bales analysis below.  Zwicki’s sins are worse than what I, in my haste to get this up, fully recognized; Jim does the due diligence.

But I think every sentient American knows that taxes don’t behave like housing or car payments.

In fact, I find it hard to believe –absurd, in fact — that McArdle, of all people, a self proclaimed libertarian, doesn’t grok the point Warren and Tyagi are trying to make as clearly as possible by using an expression for the tax burden faced by their two families in percentages.

After all, the book is about the two income trap.  And one of critical elements of that trap, as we all know, is that marginal tax rates go up at higher income levels.  This is, of course, something that McArdle has written about –notoriously quite recently, in her “calculatorgate” post.

In fact, in every context but the one in which she attacks Warren, McArdle grasps the implications of a progressive income tax, and she should, of course, given the fact, noted above, that every American who has ever looked at a tax table recognizes that the last dollar of income above minimum thresholds is taxed at a higher rate, a higher percentage than is the first.

So, quite the contrary to the charges leveled against them by Zwicki and McArdle:  Warren and Tyagi weren’t obscuring a fact that anyone — probably even McArdle’s calculator! — could obtain in seconds from the raw data they povided in full.  Rather, they were making the point that their own argument required in the best form they could — which, I meekly say, as the writer of this and that myself, is the essential core of an author’s job.

And that argument, the one that Warren and Tyagi developed across a couple of hundred pages, turned on explicating the fact that two incomes do not bring wealth proportional to the effort expended to acquire them.

Which is what would be understood, pretty clearly, I believe, by any reader unburdened by a willed desire not to get it.  How hard is to grasp that marginal tax rates in progressive taxation systems — which are generally pretty well expressed as percentages — act as a drag on the aspirations of two earner families?

This is not a raving radical position.

I believe I’ve heard some conservatives lament this very fact.

All of which is to say that there was nothing “weird’ about Warren and Tyagi’s metrics– unless asking a reader to do a quick bit of mental arithmetic (what’s one quarter of 39K vs. one third of 68) is somehow a malicious act by authors bent on deceit.

That McArdle might find that task daunting I find plausible, barely, given her recent trouble with long division.

But really, I know that she’s perfectly capable of handling fractions.  This is pretty clearly a case of willful misreading to a malicious end,  a baffle with bullsh*t moment.

So, with that,  I’m left here with is her own question, again rephrased for those in charge at The Atlantic. Does it matter if your “Business and Economics Editor” cannot consistently grasp the simplest of calculations, the most elementary of analyses?  Is it worse that McArdle understands what she is doing, or that she doesn’t?

*My personal favorite has always been number 2, but that’s just me.

**…Then, seemingly oblivious of the hilarity that thus ensues, Zywicki converts a number of the other quantities into percentages to make comparisons of the relative weight of different expenses possess in the two family’s budgets.  Seriously.  Oh well.  That was long ago, in a country far, far away, and besides, the kvetch is dead.

***He seems to think Warren and Tyagi are concealing this fact, as if it is beyond the ken for someone to notice that $8,000 is a smaller chunk of around 68K than roughly $5,200 is of $39,000. Truly, this just isn’t that hard.

Images:  Jan Massys, “At the Tax Collector,” 1539

The title pages to two arithmetic texts published in Germany in 1514

Sitting Republican Senators Who Voted to “Raise” Taxes for Next Year

I started this post yesterday, put it aside to listen to some very loud, very find jazz last night, and got up this morning to find that Paul Krugman got there first (as usual).

But just to amplify the point:

As you listen to Republican officeholders and their co-conspirators  complain that allowing the middle-to-rich-redistributive Bush tax cuts to lapse on schedule amounts to an Obama/Democratic tax increase, please remember those current members of the Grand Old Party’s delegation in the United States Senate who voted in favor of this “increase.”

They are:

Lamar Alexander, TN

Robert Bennett, UT

Kit Bond, MO

Sam Brownback, KS

Jim Bunning, KY

Saxby Chambliss, GA

Thad Cochran, MS

Susan Collins, ME

John Coryn, TX

Mike Crapo, ID

John Ensign, NV

Mike Enzi, WY

Lindsay Graham, NC

Chuck Grassley, IA

Judd Gregg, NH

Orrin Hatch, UT

Kay Bailey Hutchinson, TX

Jim Inhofe, OK

Jon Kyl, AZ

Richard Lugar, IN

Mitch McConnell, KY

Lisa Murkowski, AK

Pat Roberts, KS

Jeff Sessions, AL

Richard Shelby, AL

Olympia Snowe, ME

Arlen Spector then R, now D-PA

George Voinovich, OH

Twenty eight of the 50 “aye” votes on H.R. 2, the Bush tax death warrant on the Federal budget, remain in the US Senate.  27 of them are still Republicans, including all six of the current Republican leadership team. You will hear repeatedly over the next few days and weeks from them about the horrors of “increasing taxes” in a recession — and how once again it is the Democratic party seeking to worsen the tax burden Americans must bear.

But never forget:  each one of them voted for a bill that said very clearly that the Bush era tax reductions were temporary, by law set to expire this year.  Not one Democrat then, and only one new Democrat, Arlen Spector, voted for that tax “increase.”  The Republicans did.  Every last one of them sitting in the Senate that year.  It’s their fault, and their responsibility.

Of course, as Ezra Klein points out, the real issue is that the GOP then was doing what the GOP does a lot these days.  Lying about what they are doing, lying about fiscal matters, lying about the implications and the consequences of their actions.  There was never any intention to allow these taxes to lapse.  The expiration date made it into the bill to reduce the apparent cost of this enormous transfer of wealth from the American middle and working classes to the rich. If the tax rate changes had been made permanent, the pricetag would –might — have been too much even for the habitual economical recklessness that defines the contemporary Republican party.

There was an assumption hidden within all that, of course, which was that the GOP was on its way to building a lasting majority, however precarious it may have been in that 50-50 divided Senate.  But it didn’t work out that way, in large part because the Republican elite has shown itself to be hugely successful as an opposition force, but a disaster as a governing body. So now faced with the blunt fact that the exact bill they voted for is in fact the law of the land, they do the only thing they know how to do:  pretend it didn’t turn out as badly as it did, and blame the Democrats for trying to address the reality of the situation.

Makes for great Fox soundbites and Serious People™ appearances on NPR.  But to get there you have to lie, distort your own complicity, and, along the way, double down on a policy whose failure is obvious now even to some of its former architects.

All this is a long winded way of saying that the deceptive GOP debating tactics on the fate of the Bush tax cuts is just one more reminder of why these people cannot be trusted with actual power, certainly no more of it than they already abuse.

Image:  Marinus Claesz van Reymerswaele, “Two Tax Collectors,” c. 1540