The new plan as Hank Paulson gets around to doing what liberals were generally saying he should have done weeks ago — partially nationalize the big banks in order to recapitalize them. Here’s the money involved:
To the best of my knowledge, this is the right thing to be doing. Of course there are a lot of issues with the details, and I don’t really grasp them all, like how, exactly, this tiering system that determines how much money everyone gets was worked out.
I wonder how the negotiators hit upon this figure:
West Palm Beach Congressman Tim Mahoney (D-FL), whose predecessor resigned in the wake of a sex scandal, agreed to a $121,000 payment to a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him, according to current and former members of his staff who have been briefed on the settlement, which involved Mahoney and his campaign committee.
Mahoney, who is married, also promised the woman, Patricia Allen, a $50,000 a year job for two years at the agency that handles his campaign advertising, the staffers said.
Someone needs to learn that if he’s going to bother with expensive coverups, he needs to hire less leaky staff first!
In 2007, NPR broadcast a now-infamous climate debate on the proposition “Global warming is not a crisis.” In theory, this sounds like an easy win for the “nay” side — “crisis” is obviously the mildest of words to describe the greatest preventable existential threat to the health and well-being of future generations.
But in practice such debates are almost unwinnable, even by those who are good at debating in public, a group that does not include very many scientists. As noted in Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1, scientists are lousy at rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Significantly, rhetoric, was discovered and developed by the Greeks and Romans in part to help them win debates, so it follows that modern debates are also won by those who are better at using the strategies and tactics of rhetoric. In his dialogue Gorgias about the master rhetorician, Plato gives him a speech that dramatizes the awesome power of rhetoric:
If a rhetorician and a doctor visited any city you like to name and they had to contend in argument before the Assembly or any other gathering as to which of the two should be chosen as doctor, the doctor would be nowhere, but the man who could speak would be chosen, if he so wished.
So a rhetorician could persuade any audience, no matter how intelligent, that he or she was more of a doctor than a real doctor. No surprise, then, that someone skilled in rhetoric can beat a scientist in a debate on climate.
The 2007 debate had, “speaking for the motion: Michael Crichton, Richard S. Lindzen, Philip Stott” and “speaking against the motion: Brenda Ekwurzel, Gavin Schmidt, Richard C.J. Somerville” — bios, audio, and transcript here, some analysis is here. The painfully inevitable result as announced by NPR’s Brian Lehrer at the end:
And now the results of our debate. After our debaters did their best to sway you … you went from, 30% for the motion that global warming is not a crisis, from 30% to 46%. [APPLAUSE] Against the motion, went from 57% to 42%… [SCATTERED APPLAUSE].
A few more debates like that and we can all buy beachfront property in Baton Rouge.
Personally, I still do one-on-one debates from time to time, although they are almost unwinnable against a sophisticated denier or delayer, like, say Lomborg. But a 3-on-3 is quite counterproductive, since the other side will just go after your weak link(s). The other flaw in this debate is the proposition. “Crisis” is a losing word — sorry Al — a word the public has grown tired of, since it’s been applied to too many (every?) major public ploicy problem in the last two decades.
In this post, I’ll talk a little bit about why “smart-talkers” like scientists don’t tend to win debates. I won’t critique the climate scientists in the 2007 debate, but comment instead on two of the deniers/delayers. Stott spends a considerable amount of time pushing the favorite denier narrative that just a few decades ago, scientists believed the climate was cooling but now they believe it’s warming. I will explain below why someone who has spent 10 years using “modern techniques of deconstruction to grand environmental narratives, like global warming,” would devote so much time to repeating such a long-debunked myth.
Even more fascinating is the opening statement from the one non-scientist in the debate, Crichton, who has obviously become very rich precisely because he knows how to put together (fictional) narratives that are compelling to millions of people. He adopts the classic everyman position that is classic old-school rhetoric:
Right-wing pundit Bill Kristol was attacked today by the McCain campaign after declaring that John McCain is waging a “pathetic campaign” and should “fire” his staff. Spokesperson Nancy Pfotenhauer said Kristol had “bought into the Obama campaign’s party line,” while Tucker Bounds said, “I know Bill Kristol is an intelligent guy, I just don’t think what he had to say was very intelligent.” This afternoon on Fox News, Kristol fired back:
Is John McCain the best messenger for his campaign? Why isn’t he on this show? Why do we have Tucker Bounds and a bunch of nice young kids who are spokesmen out there spinning implausibly on behalf of the McCain campaign? McCain is better than his campaign.
Watch it:
Later in the interview, Kristol said if McCain fired his staff, it would “send the same signal Bush sent when he replaced Rumsfeld…and won the war.”
New McCain stump speech:
Senator Obama is measuring the drapes and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending — take away your right to vote by secret ballot and labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq
I was non-metaphorically laying the groundwork to hang some curtains earlier today and it occurred to me that I don’t quite get this metaphor. I’m measuring my window and hoping to get appropriately sized curtains. What are you going to accomplish by measuring the drapes? You can’t make your window smaller.
To say something else about the stimulus issue, any time the subject of stimulus arises there’s some support for doing an extension of unemployment benefits as part of the package. That’s an idea that I’ve liked less-and-less the more of learned about it. There’s some real evidence that the bad incentive structure extensions creates does a non-trivial amount to undercut the stimulus effect. It’s still a better idea that, say, “tax cuts for rich people!” but it’s worse than a lot of other ideas. Basically, we should be spending money to put people to work doing something useful — infrastructure! — not giving them money that’s conditions on their continued idleness.
The Washington Post Fact Checker takes a look at Sarah Palin’s claim that the Troopergate report cleared her “of any hint of any kind of unethical activity.” The Post writes that is the “reverse of the truth”: “What is not debatable is that the report clearly states that she violated the State Ethics Act. ” The Post awards Palin four Pinocchios — its highest rating for false statements.
ABC News’ Jake Tapper also notes that Palin’s statements are “flatly false.”
On MSNBC this afternoon, host Andrea Mitchell asked McCain-Palin campaign spokeswoman Meg Stapleton: “Wasn’t [Palin] overstating it? She wasn’t cleared of anything unethical because the conclusion was that she had violated the ethics rules of the state of Alaska.” Stapleton responded, “This Governor did nothing wrong and did nothing unlawful.” Watch it:
Ezra Klein makes the case for meat reform. Which is to say reform of the set of policies — notably grain subsidies, FDA approval of feeding cattle a solid diet of antibiotics, and lax regulatory treatment of feedlot waste — that make the current American diet of cheap, plentiful, crappy beef economically reasonable. I heartily agree.
I’m a little bit less sure that such reform would, on its own, actually produce a dramatic decline in the overall quantity of meat people eat. The thing about grass-fed beef (for example) as opposed to the conventional stuff is that it’s really good. The only difference between subsidized corn and unsubsidized corn is that the latter costs more. But the difference between feedlot beef and the traditional product is price and quality. Indeed, thanks to the quality gap, there’s a viable market in quality meat even with the competitor in the field and receiving subsidies. If we shifted all of our meat to a different point on the price/quality spectrum, people would obviously need to make some adjustments to their consumption habits. But along with reduced meat consumption, there are various other options — including switching from beef to pork, switching from pricier to cheaper cuts of meat, and just sucking it up and paying more money — all of which are made more palatable by the product’s quality improving.
Now, obviously, part of the disagreement here stems from the fact that Ezra has tofu recipes whereas I went to the farmer’s market to buy free range pork sausage from Truck Patch Farms yesterday (and tomatoes, about which more later).
According to a new ABC poll, 90 percent of registered voters say the country is going in the wrong direction. Only 23 percent approve of President Bush:
Given the global economic crisis, a record 90 percent of registered voters say the country is seriously off on the wrong track, the most since this question first was asked in 1973. At 23 percent, Bush’s job approval rating has fallen below Nixon’s lowest; it’s a point away from the lowest in 70 years of polling, set by Harry Truman in early 1952. Bush’s disapproval, meanwhile, is at an all-time record — 73 percent. … Reflecting these economic worries, just 44 percent of Americans are confident they’ll have enough money to carry them through retirement.
In August, a USA Today/Gallup poll found that 80 percent of the electorate said the country is headed in the wrong direction.
A1: She wants to help people remember what they looked like before her policies render them extinct.
A2: She likes sticking it to the bears.
A3. She couldn’t find a wolf-cub pin.
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is famously fighting the Bush administration liberals who designated the polar bears a threatened species, and her global warming denial, if enshrined into law, would finish off the bear’s habitat (see “McCain VP Palin is a global-warming-denying, polar-bear-dissing, Pat Buchanan acolyte“).
Yet she wears a polar bear pin off her right shoulder. [Some of you are looking in the wrong direction. That image off to the side of Palin's right shoulder is Cindy McCain, who I'm guessing just loves standing behind her husband's VP choice.]
Notwithstanding Palin’s faux pas of wearing white (with a white pin!) after Labor Day, her pin is clearly missing either a bull’s-eye or a red circle with a slash through it. I wonder what Polar bears against Palin think of this.
Given that eBay founder Meg Whitman is a McCain supporter, I suppose it is no surprise that you can buy the same pin Palin wears on eBay:
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