It’s the economy, stupid!

Well, it’s been quite some time since anyone posted here.  The thing about blogging is that momentum is the key.  When people are posting frequently, you get a virtuous cycle that encourages others to post.  On the flip side, when there is a sudden lull in posting, say around the holidays perhaps, everyone stops posting.  But it’s a new year, and maybe if I give this another go, there is a chance that our other contributors will be encouraged to post something worth your time.  Until then, you’ve got me.

The commentariat is all abuzz with a debate over whether, now that the House has passed the Job-Killing-Repeal-Obamacare bill, the Senate should even allow debate on it.  Harry Reid has said it won’t come to the floor for a vote.  Still, some in the left-leaning blogosphere want to see the senate Democrats drag out the debate, forcing Republicans into embarrassing votes on popular provisions of the law.

This seems to me like an obvious mistake.  The debate on health care is over. End of story. 

True, there are a handful of people still obsessing about the Affordable Care Act – the tea party. Everyone else is tired of this debate.  It passed, the world didn’t come to an end, and Democrats will continue to take deserved credit as popular provisions of the bill continue to become law.  But the president isn’t experiencing a resurgence in the polls because people are spending all of their time thinking about the ACA.  He’s surging in the polls because he signed a bunch of bills in the lame duck session that made it look like he is trying to fix the damned economy and because some good economic numbers posted.  Period.

So let the Senate Republicans spend their time whining that the Democrats won’t let them bring the repeal bill to the floor all they want.  In the meantime, the Democrats in the Senate should be brining a new bill to the floor every week dealing with small business loans, infrastructure projects, higher education access, etc.  And call the bills “The Small Business Growth Act” and “The 21st Century Workforce Investment Act”. If the Republicans shut up and pass the bills, great.  The president will get credit for getting stuff done and for being “bipartisan”.  If they filibuster and demand a vote on health care repeal, great.  The Republicans look like obstructionists who care more about some repeal bill that the president will never sign than they do about creating jobs.  Either way Obama wins.

The point here is this:  the economy is going to continue to slowly recover over the next two years.  The only question is how much credit the president and the Democrats will get for it.  With any luck, they will get a few bills through that actually speed up the recovery, but even if they don’t, FDR was elected and then re-elected twice before the economy ever really started to recover because, irrespective of the economic conditions, he looked like he was doing everything he could to get the economy moving again.

Or the Democrats could let the Republicans set the agenda, make them take a few mildly embarrassing votes.  Like Ezra Klein, I doubt that forcing them to take those votes will hurt the Republicans much, but even if it does, the Democrats will do so at the cost of looking like they don’t understand how badly the economy sucks.

The real change in aviation security

Given the brevity of the American attention span, I understand that it’s a bit late in the game to be offering any insights into the underwear attack, but I took the holidays off from blogging. In any event, the President is getting the results of his investigations into the matter today, so I say that it is still timely. Even in 2010.

I think that the market in opinions about intelligence failures, al Qaida’s capacity to execute sophisticated attacks, and body scans is pretty well cornered at this point. Still, it’s worth pointing out that this attempted attack really highlights the fact that a 9/11-style attack would be really hard to pull off today.

The 9/11 hijackers were able to hijack the planes by using history against us. Prior to 9/11, it was widely understood that the best thing to do in a hijacking was to just let the terrorist do his thing and you would probably walk away safely. Hijacking and suicide bombing had, up to that point, been separate endeavors. What we saw in the case of the shoe bomber shortly after 9/11 was a radical shift in the average passenger’s cost-benefit analysis. All of a sudden, inaction seemed much more likely to kill you and lots of other people so attacking the would-be hijacker became a much more appealing option.

8 years later, the undie bomber episode tells us that the changed perception of hijacking is probably here to stay. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it is somehow less likely that suicide bombers will be able to blow up individual planes (though query whether pre-9/11 passangers would have been sufficiently suspicious to prevent either the shoe or the underpants bomb). It does mean, however, that it would be incredibly difficult to actually hijack a plane and use it as a missile. That may seem like cold comfort to the victims on the plane that blows up, but it’s a significant security improvement and it has nothing to do with the TSA or the US counterterrorism apparatus. 9/11 was at least an order of magnitude worse in terms of human life, economic cost, and damage to the national psyche than a successful underwear bomb would have been. That’s no reason to stop improving security or intelligence procedures, but it’s still good news.

An even better Christmas present

Forget about health care reform.  The House just passed what’s sure to be it’s most popular legislative achievement in the last decade on a voice vote.  The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act would:

[R]equire the Federal Communications Commission to prescribe a standard to preclude commercials from being broadcast at louder volumes than the program material they accompany.

And you thought the days of unanimous consent in the Senate were over.  Now if only they could do something about the Sham Wow guy…

h/t Matt Yglesias

Update* – According to at least one study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, commericals aren’t actually louder than the television shows they appear on.  Instead, the TV shows have a wider range of decibel levels throughout the program.  The commercials tend to have a much narrower decibel range at the top end of the program volume.  So the volume that the show might use only in a scene with an explosion and lots of gunfire, for example is the volume of the commercial.  Still, the average decibel level of the actual program is probably significantly lower than the average decibel level of its commercials, even if the show sometimes gets as loud as its commercials.

Can the Senate bind itself?

There is a fair amount of buzz on right-leaning blogs suggesting that a portion of the Senate’s health care bill is unconstitutional because purports to limit the discretion of future Senates.  The Senate bill sets up a Medicare advisory committee that is basically designed to make recommendations on cost saving measures in the Medicare system.  In an attempt to keep future congresses from watering down good cost-saving ideas that may be politically unpleasant, the bill states that any recommendation from the advisory committee can only be amended in the senate by a 3/5 vote so that the proposals are essentially accepted or rejected in their entirety.

Jonathan Alder asks if the Senate is allowed to bind future Senates in this way and Eric Posner says no.  I’m no expert parliamentarian, but I would like to know one thing: if this Senate cannot constitutionally bind future Senates with a 3/5 requirement to amend a bill sent from the advisory committee, how is it that previous Senates are allowed to bind the current Senate with a 3/5 requirement for cloture?

If that provision of the health care bill doesn’t pass the constitutional smell test, shouldn’t each Senate also have to vote to establish its own filibuster rules? If so, this Senate hasn’t done so, and the Republicans are no more able to filibuster anything than the Democrats are able to restrict the amendment process of future bills. Sounds like a fair trade.

Diminishing returns on health care reform

A mummy with a "Cadillac" plan

Beau’s discussion of end-of-life treatment and cost control reminds me that in the health care debate there are two related but distinct problems. The first problem is the rate at which health care costs are growing relative to the rest of the economy such that, if unaddressed, the cost of health care could literally bankrupt the country. This staggering level of cost growth is largely driven by the fact fact that people who have health insurance tend to demand more health care than they need because they don’t directly have to pay the costs of treatment. The second problem is that there are also a whole lot of people who are under-treated because they can’t afford any health insurance or because the policies they can afford are inadequate (think excessive deductables or policies that exclude treatment for pre-existing conditions).

The reason I support the Senate health care bill is because it attempts to do something to address each of these problems. In fact, it uses the benefits of reducing over-treatment (in savings and tax revenues) to pay for the costs of reducing under-treatment.

The Baucus plan to tax generous insurance policies which encourage over-treatment and the plan to try and limit unnecessary Medicare costs through an independent commission are not going to solve the problem of runaway costs, but the will probably make a dent. Similarly, the expansion of Medicaid, the creation of exchanges to enhance consumer information (and thereby competition) in the individual market, the provision of subsidies to buy health insurance, and the fact that states can take those subsidies to essentially create their own “public options” will all serve to noticably reduce the problem of under-treatment.

Again, none of this is to say that the bill will solve either problem. I also recognize that in an ideal world, we would get a bill that did more to reduce both problems if not solve them. Still, we don’t live in an ideal world. A lot of liberals want to start over and push a better bill through using the filibuster-proof reconcilliation process. That may sound good, but the lesson of the past 8 months is that the longer the health care debate goes on, the less popular reform becomes. People don’t like long policy debates in Congress, they like Congresses that do things. Perhaps a little too much (think of the PATRIOT Act). Even if all we needed were 50 votes, it’s not obvious to me that we would have even that if this went on for several more months.

Of course if Harry Reid could get 50 votes a few months from now, holding out for a somewhat better health care bill would still have important costs. Health care is a really important issue, but it isn’t the only really important issue. I don’t even think it’s the most important issue (health care is a big problem for the United States but climate change is a catastrophic problem for the whole world). The longer the Senate is crippled by this health care debate the longer it will be before they start addressing any of the other critical issues on the collective agenda.

The point here is that at some point the marginal benefit of making the health bill a little more perfect is going to be outweighed by the benefits we would see as a country from doing at least something on these other issues. I think we have reached that point.

Fellow liberals, it’s time to pass the damned bill and move on.

The indignant Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is shocked, shocked at the notion that Ben Nelson (D-NE) was able to get an additional federal subsidy for the state of Nebraska out of the Senate health care bill.

Under the Senate version of the bill, part of the uninsured will be covered by an expansion of the Medicaid program to low income families.  Right now, the Medicaid program is funded by a combination of state and federal dollars.  To help ease the transition for cash-strapped states, the bill provides that initially the feds will cover 100% of the cost of the expansion of Medicaid.  Over time the states will start picking up some of the tab until the balance gets back to normal.  Ben Nelson negotiated a longer transition period expected to cost $100M over 10 years.  Vermont and Massachusetts got similar deals, but at higher costs.

Sen. Graham calls this a bribe and says that he wants the South Carolina Attorney General to look into whether it is constitutional.  While he’s at it, I’d recommend that the AG also look into whether Sen. Graham’s $275M in earmark spending directed exclusively toward South Carolina in 2008 is similarly unconstitutional.  Granted, Sen. Graham hasn’t requested any earmark spending in 2009.  Nevermind the fact that he managed to “unconstitutionally” funnel 275% more money to South Carolina in the course of 1 year than Nelson’s deal will send to Nebraska over the course of 10.

It’s heartwarming to see that at least one person in Washington is still able to produce some sincere moral outrage.

More on flipping Olympia Snowe

Apropos of my previous suggestion that Olympia Snowe might flip her party affiliation if she faces a serious primary challenge in Maine (along the lines of what Arlen Specter did), she all but admitted to the NY Times that her only reason for opposing the bill at this point is fear of getting “primaried”. According to the times, she voted against cloture late last night, not because the bill didn’t meet all of her demands (which it did), but because it was being “rushed through” the Senate.

The bill in the Senate is the result of at least 8 months of very public debate and the fact that Sen. Snowe is using that as her excuse for voting against it underlines how scared she is of a serious primary challenger in 2012 from a more conservative Republican. She is clearly ready to vote for the bill on idealogical grounds and probably has been for some time. The road block, it seems, is the Republican insistence on a combination of assinine intransigence and ideological purity.

The solution? Keep courting her. Even if the Persident never gets her vote on an important issue, the mere appearance of moderation or cooperation with our Stalinist-Nazi-Muslim-Terrorist president will probably be sufficient to push her to the blue side of the aisle. And don’t forget that Maine is significantly more liberal as a state than Nebraska. If Sen. Snowe were a Democrat, make no mistake that she would be voting for this bill and Harry Reid wouldn’t have needed Ben Nelson’s vote.

A good Christmas present

You probably know by now that the Senate voted to cut off debate on the health care bill and is almost certain to pass it around 7pm EST on Christmas eve. I’ll go on record as noting that it’s probably the best Christmas present that the Senate has given to the country in it’s history. complain all you want about this provision that didn’t make the cut or that one that got watered down. The bottom line is that more people will have health insurance and fewer people are going to needlessly die. That’s especially true for lots of children who are currently uninsured, but who will get insurance under the bill.

Fewer dead kids. If you don’t think that’s both consistent with the “Christmas spirit” and an improvement over the status quo, I suppose we see things differently.

I should also note, though, that this doesn’t change my assessment of the Senate. The fact that a good bill is going to pass doesn’t mean that the House bill wasn’t better than what we’ll get with the Senate. On immigration reform, climate change, and financial regulation, I think that if we see the Senate pass any bills at all, they are going to be significantly less effective than what we would get in a unicameral system.

What to Read on Oil

Oil might be a little passé in the current global discourse with crude oil prices around 73 dollars a barrel, but Foreign Affairs has put on a great reading list on the topic of oil here. It is a pretty good bet that oil will sometime soon be front and center in the global mindset. Maybe now is the time to catch up the reading back log? Light December reading–probably not–but these reading are well worth the look. Please add your thoughts and suggested reading in the comments too.

“Is the Senate Necessary?” Yes!

In response to my good friend Andy Holmer on his article “Is the Senate Necessary?” I respond with a resounding yes. I would like to agree with him that the Senate and the Republicans are dragging their feet on important and necessary legislation that has been coming out of the House. But as software engineers say, “it is a feature, not a bug.” While the US House is built to be responsive to the swings in political directions and desire of the citizens, the Senate was built to mediate these swings. This is the reason why every US Representatives is up for reelection every two years. The Senate was not even elected through direct election in the original constitution. It was not until the 17^th Amendment was ratified by the States in 1913 were US Senators elected directly by the people instead of by each state’s legislature. Yet the premise still stands, the Senate, and their rules, are built to require a higher level of consensus instead of simple majority required in the US House.

Andy makes a nice point that 41 Senators only represent 37% of the US population, but part of a democratic society is the protection of the minority (even if you disagree with it). Additional, the federal government is not a democratic system, but instead a republic. Remember, the founding fathers were scared of direct democracy and the power of the common man. Senators have incentives and we hope that the main incentive is to respond to the needs and wants of their citizens in their state through the ultimate confirmation of reelection.

I might not like it, Andy might not like it, but it is a feature, not a bug. If you want to move legislation through the Senate, you need to either shape it so it is more on the side of Republicans or show the Republicans that they will not have jobs after the next election if they stand opposed to the legislation. I believe if the Democrats work hard enough to show the people this is the right cause, unemployment numbers for Republican Senators will see an uptick come November 2010.

Is the Senate necessary?

I’m not all that encouraged.  So far this year the house has passed a health care bill, a climate change bill, and a financial regulation bill.  Now it looks like they’re going to take on immigration reform.

The Senate, on the other hand, is almost maybe perhaps going to think about passing a health care bill before the new year.  To be fair, they did pass a stimulus bill.  To be even more fair, though, the compromises necessary to get a stimulus bill out of the Senate meant that the stimulus was significantly smaller than it ought to have been.  That means that, even though we got some kind of stimulus, the recession will probably be longer and more painful (read higher unemployment for a longer period of time) than it would have been without a Senate.

On the bright side, at least the Senate’s inclination to slow down the legislative process placed a check on President Bush when he wanted to invade Iraq, cut taxes at irresponsible levels instead of providing for the nation’s long-term fiscal health, and gut the clean air act.  Seriously, can anyone point to one example from the last ten years of a way in which the nation is better off because the Senate exists?  The U.K. seems to be doing fine with effectively one house of parliament.

It’s bad enough that the way representation in the Senate is allocated means that the Senate is a highly undemocratic institution.  It’s even worse that their filibuster rules make it even more countermajoritarian such that 41 Senators representing 37% of the population* can veto essentially any piece of legislation.  In years past, the Senate has served essentially as an institution designed to essentially send a higher level of government services to rural states than their share of the population would otherwise suggest and, in some instances (namely civil rights), protect the parochial interests of regional blocs.  Now it just seems like the place where legislation goes to die.

A lot of liberals seem to be blaming this shift on the President, but it seems to me that it has a lot more to do with the electoral incentives of Senators than it does with the President’s desire to get things done.  Anyone who thinks that Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod are content to sit around and wait for the Senate to pass a health care bill on its own time should contact me about a bridge I have for sale.  The President just doesn’t have all that much leverage over lots of individual senators.  Republican senators have gamed it out and made the craven decision that a faltering economy, high unemployment, millions of people without health care, and climate disaster are electorally advantageous.  The notion that if the President only tried a little harder everything would work out seems to me to be totally wrongheaded.  The  problem is that the great deliberative body is making the nation essentially ungovernable.

*Note – the 41 senators include every Republican Senator and Joe Lieberman.  The 37% statistic is determined by assigning each senator half of the population of his or her state, summing those numbers, and dividing by the national population.

Statistics

The great blogger on Student Loan Analytics pointed to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York U.S. Credit Conditions map that shows 90+ day delinquency rates by counties in the US. The data is broken down by types of credit, including student loans. The SLA reported the counties with the highest delinquency rates for students loans.

The interesting point missing from the Federal Reserve Bank data list is the population size of these counties and total student loan borrowers. For instance Quitman, Mississippi county has a population size of just 8,724 people based on the last census data (per Google). With the fact that the average age in rural counties is above 40 years old, how many of 8,724 citizens would have student loans? If only a few of these people have students loans, and just a few are 90 days past due, it can make the 90+ percentage much higher without being statically significant.

Below is a list of the next three counties and their delinquency rates (based on US census data):

Meigs, Tennessee 50.00% – pop of 11,086
Woodruff, Arkansas 41.38% – pop of 8,741
Hamilton, Florida 40.66% – pop of 13,327

It is the hope that we do not paint rural areas with a broad brush based on their “statistically” high delinquency rates without looking more closely at the data.

Happy Birthday

Continuing with my general posting themes on monetary policy (gee, I wonder what her dissertation is on?), I want to wish the Federal Reserve Bank a happy 95th birthday today! The Fed opened its doors today in 1914 and the rest, as they say, is monetary history.

Fed Bashing in Financial Overhaul?

After more than a year of research, hearings, and contemplation, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) has unveiled his plan for an overhaul of financial regulatory system. His plan calls for the creation of a single clearinghouse for certain types of financial instruments and banking regulators. It would move these oversight bodies from the FDIC and Federal Reserve, which currently conduct a large share of banking regulation, to a unified new body. The assumption behind this move seems to be that division of labor is inefficient for conducting oversight. While having a central agency that collects and analyzes data from various sources may be useful, the assumption that redundancy and overlapping competencies are somehow bad for regulators strikes me as wrongheaded. While too many cooks may ruin the soup, I would argue that it was the the lack of regulation of the financial industry, originating from the Congress, that was the problem — not the fact that we had too many regulators who didn’t know what the others were doing. It was that no one had legal competence to regulate various financial instruments and so, these were not watched as carefully as perhaps they ought to have been.

Further, Sen. Dodd’s statements smell a bit like Fed Bashing. A decision to remove competencies that the Federal Reserve has had since the last reforms following WWII could be viewed harshly by financial markets as moves against the Fed’s legal independence and commitment to low inflation. The Federal Reserve, as a public-private enterprise, is uniquely situated to know what is happening in the banking sector since its Boards of Directors (at the regional reserve banks) are partly composed of bankers (as well as representatives from other major regional industries), the Fed draws some of the best and brightest economists, and has extensive preexisting knowledge of the financial markets in the US. Divesting the Fed of its regulatory powers would serve as a significant move against its institutional strength with limited benefits in terms of the regulatory apparatus as proposed under the Dodd plan.

Is Olympia Snowe going to become a Democrat?

 

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) metting with President Obama

A couple of weeks ago, I posited that all of the Obama Administration’s overtures to Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) might be aimed at something more than a Republican vote on health insurance reform – namely, upsetting the electoral dynamic in Maine and picking up Snowe for the Democrats like they did with Arlen Specter after he voted for the stimulus bill.  In this instance, I’m actually quite pleased to say “I told you so.”

 

Numbers released today from a Maine poll conducted by Public Policy Polling show that Snowe would lose badly in a Republican primary against a more conservative challenger.  59%-31% to be exact.  Of course, there is a lot of time between now and 2012, when Snowe is up for reelection, and she may yet be able to salvage her conservative credentials with the Republican base in Maine, but I doubt it.  The conservative base in makes up about 2/3 of the Republican Party in Maine, and they dislike Snowe by a margin of 75%-18%.  Unless she can make some serious inroads with the far right, her career as a Republican politician is going to come to a close in a little less than 3 years.

Granted, my scenario presumes that to stay in politics, Snowe would switch parties a la Specter rather than withdraw and run as an independent who caucuses with the Republicans a la Joe Lieberman (or retire from politics altogether).  Assuming she decides to run again in 2012, however, I think it’s more likely that she would run as a Democrat than as an independent.  Snowe’s overall approval rating right now is 51%, but that is largely due to the 60% approval ratings that she is getting from Democrats.  A three-way race where Snowe gets very few Republican votes and the Democratic vote is split between a Democratic candidate and an Independent Olympia Snowe is still winnable, but would be a much dicier proposition than just running as a Democrat.  Moreover, even if the Democratic majority shrinks between now and then, I suspect the Democrats will still be in control of the Senate in 4 years, making her seniority much more valuable.

Like I said, only time will really tell what happens in Olympia Snowe’s case, but the lesson here is that actively courting moderate Republican support on big-ticket issues is fueling the Republican civil war and the President should keep doing it.  If you need more persuading on this point, I hear that Dede Scozzafava has some some free time to talk about it.

You don’t need to cut off the head . . .

if you can tear out the heart.

Barbara Elias posits over at Foreign Affairs that the Taliban leadership cannot be “flipped” against al Qaeda because the two organizations are too dependent on each other.*  She thinks that al Qaeda is too dependent on the Taliban for political support and security and that the Afghan Taliban is too dependent on al Qaeda for its intellectual legitimacy as the standard bearer for fundamentalist political Islam.  I suspect that is all probably true and that efforts to drive a wedge between Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar (or their deputies) will be fruitless.

Still, I don’t think this is all that interesting to a counterinsurgency strategy.  The point isn’t to flip Mullah Omar, it’s to flip the local warlords in rural Afghanistan.  This is becoming more difficult as the local Taliban fighters are increasingly acting out of an ideological identification with the Taliban and decreasingly because the Taliban is paying, but it’s conceptually a different problem.  In Iraq, for example, we didn’t have to flip top al Qaeda in Iraq leaders against one another, just the Sunni warloards in places like Anbar Province where AQI was wreaking the most havoc.

Elias’ analysis is very good as far as it goes, but her conclusion (that any effort to destroy al Qaeda wholesale also requires a similar effort against the Taliban) seems nonsensical.  Getting Mullah Omar to turn on Osama bin Laden would be nice, but it’s probably more useful to turn local warlords against Mullah Omar.  In any event, its certainly more feasible.  A good counterinsurgency strategy will not come cheaply or easily, but it can succeed as it has in Iraq if we are willing to take the risk by beginning to co-opt Taliban foot soldiers rather than Taliban commanders.  To borrow a rhetorical formula from St. Paul, if the whole Taliban were commanders, where would the fighters be?

*Note – I highly recommend reading the whole article.  There is a really good discussion of the nature of the Taliban-al Qaeda relationship as well as the differences between the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban.

Kaboom

Beau is right to highlight the special Congressional election in Upstate New York as the race to watch.  I’d add, though, that the campaign itself is the truly illuminating thing.  The result is less significant.  Irrespective of who wins tomorrow, the Republicans have cannibalized another relatively conservative (but mainstream) Republican in favor of a tea-bagger.  And as Frank Rich pointed out in his great Op-Ed for the New York Times yesterday, the “Conservative Party” candidate has some issues with his history of ideological purity, too.

Also interesting is what this forebodes for the 2012 Republican presidential primary.  As soon as Sarah Palin endorsed Doug Hoffman (the “Conservative” candidate) Tim Pawlenty (the rather boring Minnesota governor who appears to be planning a 2012 run) was falling over himself to do the same.  It would be silly to try and predict much about the Republican primary two-and-a-half years from now, but I think it’s safe to say that even if the Republicans are still capable of nominating a “moderate,” the lunatics like Palin are going to push the more middle-of-the-road folks like Pawlenty into making some pretty bone-headed decisions (think of Bill Frist’s support of the Terri Schaivo fiasco that essentially killed his presidential aspirations).

The Obama bipartisan rope-a-dope that I discussed last week is working, folks.

Start digging

Mark Kleiman gives a good interview on AirTalk going over some issues on crime that Beau and I debated here, here, here, and here.  Rest assured that he is much clearer than either of us.  I strongly encourage you to listen to the whole thing.  Then buy the book (and read my acknowledgement).

One statistic I either hadn’t heard before or had forgotten:  the ratio of people in jail to total population in the U.S. is greater than in the Soviet Union on the day Joseph Stalin died.  We should be ashamed of ourselves.  Granted, U.S. prisons don’t come even close to Soviet gulags in terms of the squalor of their living conditions, but that shouldn’t make us proud of how we treat inmates.  After an avalanche, you don’t congratulate yourself because you’re under 10 feet of snow and the other guy is under 20 – you dig your way out.

Building a narrative

A wolf that Sara Palin hasn't shot from a helicopter . . . yet

Ryan Grimm reports that Harry Reid is finally starting to push back against Republican filibusters, calling Republicans out as obstructionists.  That’s good news given my complaint earlier in the week that the Democrats are giving the Republicans a pass on their efforts to eliminate any semblance of democratic decision making in the Senate.  Still, according to the memo that Grimm cites, Reid only seems to be focused on presidential appointments.

Appointments matter a great deal in determining how effective the administration can be at tackling some really big problems, and I don’t want to minimize the importance of having a fully staffed executive branch.  But I don’t see any reason to limit the obstructionism argument to the relatively arcane topic of sub-cabinet level appointments.  The public already overwhelmingly thinks that the Republicans are acting in bad faith in the health care debate.  I don’t suspect things will be much different with respect to financial regulation or the climate change bill either.  So why don’t Harry Reid and other visible Democrats in the Senate start vocally making the case that Republican filibusters are partisan across the board?  Every time a Republican Senator places a hold on a bill or the Republican caucus threatens to filibuster, the Democrats ought to go public.

I suppose that it’s possible that Democrats could start to look like whiners, but I think that it’s more important to let the public see a pattern of unprincipled political calculation from the Republicans.  Imagine if once a week another story broke about the Republicans holding up some piece of legislation on a procedural matter.  I suspect that the frequency and the triviality would start to surprise even cynics.  Once the Democrats start to build a consistent and credible narrative about what the Republicans are trying to do, it is a lot easier to make people believe that bill they oppose going forward is a result of the same Machiavellian motive.  The Republicans wind up crying wolf so often that when a bill that they might have otherwise had enough support to filibuster (like the climate change bill) is ready to come to the floor, nobody listens and they get eaten.

This can’t come from the President.  He gets a lot of credit for trying to reach out to Republicans, and it’s partly their knee-jerk rejection of his agenda that makes them look so bad, even when Obama is sliding himself.  It has to come from the Senate.  Harry Reid made a good start with his memo yesterday, but he needs to go a lot further if he wants to get any important legislation out of the Senate going forward.  If he’s not up to the job, the Democrats need a new Majority Leader who is.  Chuck Schumer would probably be a good candidate.

Why the bubble burst

Kevin Drum finds this interesting article from the Seattle Times on the downfall of Washington Mutual and highlights this passage on WaMu’s rigorous lending standards:

Even the most notorious murder case of the 1990s made a cameo appearance, as Chapman learned in early 2007.

“Someone in Florida had made a second-mortgage loan to O.J. Simpson, and I just about blew my top, because there was this huge judgment against him from his wife’s parents,” she recalled. Simpson had been acquitted of killing his wife Nicole and her friend but was later found liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit; that judgment took precedence over other debts, such as if Simpson defaulted on his WaMu loan.

“When I asked how we could possibly foreclose on it, they said there was a letter in the file from O.J. Simpson saying ‘the judgment is no good, because I didn’t do it.’ “

I’m pretty sure that says it all.  I also love (in a very morbid way) the image of the WaMu CEO standing in front of a Lehman Brothers conference discussing WaMu’s strict lending standards and announcing that “[t]his frankly may be one of the best times I have ever seen for taking on new loans into our portfolio,” while all of the Lehman analysts and money managers nod in agreement.

I know that what these guys did wasn’t actually illegal and that we are a nation of laws and not a nation of men, but can’t somebody go to jail?  One of them has to have something they could get picked up for.  Parking tickets for all I care.