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Media Infiltrations: Republicans and the Populist Temptation  Wall Street Journal February 9, 2010 Why Taxing Stock Trades Is a Really Bad Idea Wall Street Journal January 6, 2010
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Chronicle of the Conspiracy
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Saturday, February 21, 2004
MISES ON SOFT DOLLARS According to Gregory Bresiger, the flap over soft dollar "reform" is just another case of regulators finding new ways to make old things worse by endless tinkering. Thanks to Bruce Bartlett for the link.Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:49 PM |
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Friday, February 20, 2004
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The most recent instance of this problem was Moore's characterization of Bush as a "deserter"... As if often the case with Moore's mistakes, it was quite unnecessary; he could have drawn damaging attention to the months that Bush went missing from his National Guard duties, but by using incorrectly the military term 'deserter' he damaged his own side.However, the same issue contains another pro-liberal gusher, this one for John Kerry. Hendrik Hertzberg argues that Moore's assertion is, in fact, technically correct:
Clark [allowed] Michael Moore to appear at one of his rallies and accuse Bush of having been a deserter. In the commonsense meaning of desertion --fleeing one's post under enemy fire -- the charge was absurd, because during the Vietnam War enemy fire was something Bush was at pains to stay an ocean away from. But, as Walter V. Robinson documented four years ago in a long, meticulous report in the Boston Globe, Bush apparently skipped a year of his reserve duties with the Air National Guard, starting in May of 1972.So much for The New Yorker's much-vaunted fact-checking. But then we already knew that was all just a myth.In the regular armed forces, according to a U.S. Army Research Institute study published in 2002, "any soldier who has taken an unauthorized leave from his / her training or duty station is considered AWOL. On the 31st day of AWOL, this status is officially changed to Dropped From Rolls (DFR), or desertion." Luckily for Bush, the Guard was more lenient with its weekend warriors, especially the politically well-connected ones.
Update... The ever-alert Sylvain Galineau points to this comment by Donald Sensing, and corrects my mis-spelling of Larissa MacFarquhar's name in the original version of this posting (it has been corrected in the text above).
Update [2/22/2004]... Garrity points out that the two different definitions of "desertion" appeared in the very same issue of The New Yorker (February 16). This posting, as originally published, stated that they were in two successive issues.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 2:37 PM |
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SURGING ENERGY PRICES AREN'T INFLATION? The online Wall Street Journal headlines, "CONSUMER PRICES ROSE 0.5% in January, marking the fastest pace in nearly a year. The increase reflected a surge in energy costs, suggesting that there is little inflationary pressure on the economy."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:48 AM |
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JOKE OF THE DAY
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:25 AM |
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Thursday, February 19, 2004
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J. Bradford DeLong, a $500-an-hour Harvard-educated statistician, analyzed voting patterns, exit polls and party affiliation and used statistical models to come up with a range...A Bloomberg report has DeLong's performance recorded even less gloriously, with a sadly typical DeLongian lack of supporting data to back up his claims:The mission for DeLong, a hulking man who testified with arms folded across his chest, was to predict how many of the 1,932 ballots cast by Republicans whose absentee applications were corrected by a Republican Party staffer ultimately would have voted for Bush...
"I think that yes, it did change the outcome of the election," said DeLong, a professor at University of California, Berkeley.
Lawyers for the defendants, the Seminole elections supervisor and the county canvassing board, scoffed at his opinions.
"He was a $500-an-hour psychic," said Gregory McNeill of Orlando.
"Those were voodoo statistics," said Terry Young, the lead defense lawyer, also of Orlando.
DeLong's testimony inspired cross-examination from four Republican lawyers. Under this questioning, DeLong said he had no data on absentee ballots to support his conclusion.Best of all is this from Jake Tapper's book on the recount fight, Down and Dirty:"Did you obtain exit-poll data from Seminole County?'' said Republican lawyer Terry Young. "I couldn't find it,'' DeLong replied. DeLong also said he had "no reason to think'' that someone other than a voter filling in identification numbers on ballot applications would affect the ballots themselves.
Richman calls to the stand a statistician, Cal Berkeley professor James [sic] DeLong, who offers a suggestion, based on proportions, of how many votes they can throw out as to be fair, while not tossing all 15,000. But…DeLong's inexperience serves Bush well. Richman sees him fall apart on cross-examination, expressing opinions outside his area of expertise.I don't know why I'm bothering to watchdog DeLong. The more I think about, the more I like him just where he is.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:44 PM |
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OKRENT'S OUTSIDE INTERESTS It was announced today that New York Times "public editor" Daniel Okrent has been named a director of TESSCO Technologies Incorporated, a public company (NASDAQ: TESS). Let's see if the Times reports it.
I'm certainly not suggesting that there is a conflict here, or whether conflicts of this sort even matter (God forbid a reporter or editor should actually participate in the real world -- he might get something right for a change). And I don't see any specific prohibition of this in the Times' Ethical Journalism Guidebook. Okrent is already a director of a private company, Zinio Systems.
I have asked Okrent for a comment, and so far have gotten nothing back.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:24 PM |
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- "People revere him. After he gave a speech at last year's Oscars denouncing President Bush and the Iraq war, he received many letters from soldiers thanking him for opening their eyes to the lies of the government and for confirming their view that they are fighting for a country where dissent is embraced."
- "Moore has been a hero to comedians for fifteen years..."
- "...someone suggests -- as people frequently do -- that he run for President."
- "His influence is extraordinary."
- "A few of Moore's stunts did effect some remarkable changes. 'TV Nation' reported on undocumented workers who had been fired for trying to form a union, and the adverse publicity got them their jobs back."
Never mind that MacFarquhar reports that Moore's movies haven't done well with working-class audiences, and that his television shows have been cancelled after short runs. She dutifully and uncritically reports Moore's claim that working-class people "thump him on the back and congratulate him." Never mind that MacFarquhar reports that Moore funded his first movie with the proceeds of a wrongful termination suit against the leftist rag Mother Jones. She quotes one Moore associate saying, "'I just hate the way the left is always cannibalizing itself'" and Moore's ex-wife bragging, "'Past employee grumblings are somewhat pointless...They exist in a comedy ghetto, one we have pole-vaulted over.'"
The article does not fail to cite Moore's shortcomings or quote his critics. But these elements are presented in a way that either trivializes them, offers defenses against them, or even turns them into virtues.
- "When Moore gets annoyed by people griping about his money -- his nice apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the private school that his daughter attended -- he is not being hypocritical."
- "He believes in sacrifice..."
- "Moore has been criticized, sometimes inaccurately, for getting facts wrong; he says he employs fact-checkers and lawyers but that some mistakes inevitably get through. The most recent instance of this problem was Moore's characterization of Bush as a 'deserter'... As is often the case with Moore's mistakes, it was quite unnecessary; he could have drawn damaging attention to the months that Bush went missing from his National Guard duties, but by using incorrectly the military term 'deserter' he damaged his own side."
The most astonishing case is when MacFarquhar reports on Moore's flat-out lying to a lecture audience when asked whether three men in uniform were his bodyguards. He asked the audience why they would assume that they were guards:
"'Because they are black?...One's my Pilates instructor, one's my yoga instructor, that's my sister Anne, she's my bodyguard.' ...he started talking in a serious tone again. 'I have somebody traveling with me who's working on my next movie...So that's what's up.'"
Later in the article MacFarquhar reveals that "The three uniformed men traveling with Moore were, of course" -- of course! -- "security guards -- as Moore did not deny when asked later on (though they also function as assistants)." She explains, "his instinctive response was to attack, and then to say something just short of a lie, delivered in the form of a joke."
For MacFarquhar, any of Moore's transgressions can be explained away as humor -- no, more than explained away: alchemically transformed from lie, beyond truth, all the way to Art. "'You can't debate satire,' Moore says. "Either you get it or you don't."
This particular defense of Moore helps MacFarquhar with another necessary bit of alchemy: the transformation of what is, fundamentally, a commonplace celebrity puff-piece into a the kind of highbrow Art Criticism that would deserve publication in the New Yorker. So we are treated to MacFarquhar's nihilistic theory of comedy -- "It takes the point of view that, in the end, we are just bodies, eating, defecating, and copulating, and everything else is pretentious rubbish."
And then there's MacFarquars political history of comedy. I'll bet that until now you didn't know that after the Vietnam war, "...much explicitly political comedy migrated to the right." It's true -- and MacFarquhar's evidence is that "one of the emblematic right-wing humorists of the time, P.J. O'Rourke, appears on one of his book jackets dressed like an investment banker from 1985..." As opposed to all the other emblematic right-wing humorists; there are so many to choose from. Then she reports that "Recently comedy has switched sides again" citing "humorists on the left like Moore (and Molly Ivins, Jon Stewart, David Cross, and Janeane Garofalo)." Bet you didn't know that syndicated political columnist Molly Ivins has a stand-up act.
This is all further evidence -- as if it were needed -- that Vanity Fair's editor Graydon Carter is on the right track, as always: the intersection of leftist politics and popular celebrity is today's winning combination for selling magazines to the elite. In this same issue of the New Yorker, the Moore article has to compete for the attention of the fashionable with a piece advising Democratic candidates on how to "win the war," and an expose of the Bush administration's connections with Halliburton. I have been hopelessly naive to the extent that I have allowed myself to be disappointed that the New Yorker would follow this trend so very slavishly.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:50 PM |
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CHUCK YEAGER BEING SUED BY HIS OWN CHILDREN ...over accusations that his new wife is a gold-digger. Bunch of miserable pudknockers, if you ask me.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:33 AM |
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GOP TAX-AND-SPEND House Republicans support raising taxes to fund increased highway spending -- and the conservative Weekly Standard is backing them up. Oh, brother... Thanks to Bruce Bartlett for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:19 AM |
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DOING THE RIGHT THING THE WRONG WAY The International Accounting Standards Board moves to mandate expensing of stock options.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:24 AM |
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JOKE OF THE DAY
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:14 AM |
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PHYSICIAN TO KRUGMAN: HEAL THYSELF A doctor diagnoses Krugman on health care, and it's not good. Thanks to Jon Henke of QandO for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:13 AM |
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Wednesday, February 18, 2004
SIGN ANOTHER ONE UP, DELONG From John P. Cochran, interim dean of the school of business at Metropolitan State College of Denver:"Sign me up as well. I am another signer and supporter of the Bush supply side tax cuts who has great reservations about other aspects of his domestic and budget policies."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 1:24 PM |
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JOKE OF THE DAY
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:16 AM |
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IBM AWARDS $40,000 PRIZE FOR BIAS It's true. What's next, a column in the Times?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:14 AM |
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Tuesday, February 17, 2004
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"Why can't we seem to keep the lid on medical costs, for older adults and for everyone else as well? The answer -- the clean little secret of health care -- is simple: we actually do get something for our money. In fact, there is a consensus among health care experts that the main driving force behind rising costs is neither greed nor inefficiency nor even the aging of our population but technological progress...We spend ever more on medicine mainly because we keep on finding good new things that (a lot of) money can buy."
Here's Krugman now, from today's Times column:
"Where is the money going? A lot of it goes to overhead. A recent study found that private insurance companies spend 11.7 cents of every health care dollar on administrative costs, mainly advertising and underwriting, compared with 3.6 cents for Medicare and 1.3 cents for Canada's government-run system. Also, our system is very generous to drug companies and other medical suppliers, because — unlike other countries' systems — it doesn't bargain for lower prices."
Now there's always a crisis, always a government-dominated solution, and always a handy "recent study" to prove it. There's not a trace of economics left in Krugman's columns. Everything is political.
Update... A friend notifies me that the article reference above appeared in 1997, not 1999 as originally posted.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:57 AM |
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Of course it begins with a classic Krugman trick -- the assertion that there is a "crisis." And then, of course, Krugman's solution (which is all about government taking over everything, as usual):
"What would an answer to the growing health care crisis look like? It would surely involve extending coverage to those now uninsured. To keep costs down, it would crack down both on drug prices and on administrative costs. And it might well cut private insurance companies out of the loop for some, if not all, coverage."
According to Krugman, anyone who disagrees with his self-evidently correct solution is either "ideological" or corrupt (or in the case of the Bush administration, both):
"But the administration can't offer such an answer, both because of its ideological blinders and because of its special interest ties."
Hmmm. Special interest ties? Yet another reason why John Kerry may not leap to take Krugman's campaign advice.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:57 AM |
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ROTTEN RED MEAT My latest "Krugman Truth Squad" column is up at National Review Online.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:00 AM |
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JOKE OF THE DAY
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:59 AM |
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Monday, February 16, 2004
A WHOLE NEW LEVEL OF TRIVIAL ACCOUNTABILITY AT THE TIMES The newspaper that can't police the lies of its columnists or keep liberal bias and existential negativism from creeping into every news story or mention the names of its critics swells with self-righteousness as it corrects a spelling error from almost seven years ago:"A chart on March 3, 1997, with an article about the cloning of the sheep Dolly misspelled the surname of a scientist involved in mouse-cloning experiments in 1982. He is Davor Solter, not Stolter. The error came to light last week when a new chart on the history of cloning was being prepared."Update [2/16/2004]... Irony lives. Reader Steve points out that in my original posting I had written "almost eight years" instead of "almost seven years." It has been corrected in the text above.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 1:19 AM |
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CHUCKROACH Here's an interesting report from my informant "Irrational Exuberance"...
There's a seeming error in Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach's
recent treatise on the labor market. The report, entitled
"Coping
with the Global Labor Arbitrage," has become a meme on Wall Street and was
cited by New York's Senator Schumer in his questioning of Fed Chairman
Greenspan on Thursday (see excerpt below).
Roach seems to be distorting statistics and repealing common sense in order to
further his intransigently apocalyptic macroeconomic view. Roach writes:
"To be sure, jobs are finally increasing. But the current hiring upturn pales in comparison with historical norms. Gains in private nonfarm payrolls have averaged only 84,000 over the past five months (September 2003 to January 2004) - less than half the 183,000 norm that was recorded, on average, over the comparable five-month interval of the previous six recoveries. Scaled for the expanded size of the US economy, this shortfall is even more serious. When compared with the 6.5% increase in private sector hiring that has occurred, on average, in the first 26 months of the past six cyclical upturns, the current decline of a little less than 1% translates into a shortfall of 8 million Americans who would have been at work had the US economy been on the hiring trajectory of the typical recovery."
Roach juxtaposes the 84k increase in private sector payrolls increases over
the last 5 months with an average 183k in prior recoveries. He then adjusts for
the presently larger size of the population and suggests that the percentage
expansion of those employed over the 26 post-recession months should be the 6.5%
of prior recoveries, or 8 mm more than the loss that has transpired. But Morgan
Stanley's lugubrious economist does not account for how the base unemployment
level was lower at the culmination of this recession (5.6% in 11/01).
The total number of
unemployed is currently only 8,300,000 -- so it's absurd to state that a
normal economic recovery would have produced 8,000,000 more jobs. Roach's
average cyclical upturn-postulated 8,000,000 jobs would lower the Fed's measure
of the augmented unemployment rate (number of unemployed plus those not in the
labor force that desire a job) to only 3.38%, which would cultivate a
near-eradication of the unemployment rate. (Currently the augmented unemployment
rate is 8.6% as a byproduct of a 146,863,000 mm person civilian labor force,
8,297,000 unemployed, and 4,747,000 not in labor force now but desiring a job.)
In the same report, Roach also sloppily writes:
"But there's another serious problem as well - a narrowing of the educational attainment gap between the developed and developing worlds. That could well inhibit the knowledge-based job creation that high-wage western economies are counting on to fill the void of the cross-border labor arbitrage. That possibility should not be taken lightly. US National Science Foundation data show that the United States is currently awarding only about 200,000 bachelor's degrees in engineering and science, little changed from trends in the mid-1980s. By contrast, Asia's annual graduates of science and engineering students (for China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, combined) has now hit approximately 650,000 per year; that's up over 50% from the graduation rate in the mid-1980s and fully three times the comparable degree production rate in the US.."
Roach notes that China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan collectively produce 3 times the engineering and science bachelor's degrees of the U.S., but he fails to note that these countries have a combined population that is 9 times that of the U.S.
Now, here's Schumer:
"I'd like to focus on the area I mentioned at the beginning which I am very concerned about. And, you know, when people question whether free trade is still the way to go, usually economists and editorial boards say, "You're being protectionist." But given the new changes, there are lots of very -- not lots --there are few very respected economists who are saying we ought to re-examine because the world has changed. Mr. Roach of Morgan Stanley, he calls it global labor arbitrage."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:04 AM |
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