If I were Dick Cheney, I’d be laying low thanking my lucky stars that I’m not on trial for war crimes not going on television to talk smack about the new administration. But talking smack it is. It’s really remarkable when you think about it that anyone would listen to Cheney on the subject of national security. His administration was by far the least successful in American history in terms of preventing international terrorists from murdering Americans. Also by far the least successful in American history in terms of preventing international terrorists from murdering NATO allies. And the military action his administration pursued in response to the terrorist attack we suffered under their watch has come to be mired in problems, teetering on the brink of failure, almost entirely thanks to a second—but completely unnecessary—war his administration chose to undertake in favor of successfully completing the first one.

Meanwhile, during this time hostile nations such as North Korea and Iran have become bigger proliferation threats than ever!

Steve Benen has a nice overview of conservative nonsense and hypocrisy about the gyrations of the stock market. But aside from the specific question of who deserves the blame or credit for whatever, it can’t be emphasized enough what an inappropriate measure this is. Consider the chart below looking at the price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 over time:

As you can see here, there’s a ton of variability in this metric. Some of the variation seems to be related to interest rates, but a lot of it is, as best one can tell, driven by nothing at all. It’s “animal spirits,” it’s “irrational exuberance,” it’s a mysterious x-factor. In other words, high stock market prices could reflect low interest rates, which are the result of good policy. They could also reflect good opportunities for large businesses to earn money, which would probably reflect a good economic situation, though we shouldn’t rule out the opportunity that some worthy policy initiatives might for some reason or another structurally shift opportunities away from large publicly held corporations and toward small privately held ones. And they could also just reflect speculative mania that’s not really under the control of policymakers.

What’s more, while stock price declines that are due to slow or negative economic growth are bad things, they’re mostly bad things because slow or negative growth is bad. It’s not the case that higher stock prices are systematically beneficial. Financial news is mostly consumed by people who have substantial investments, and high stock prices are beneficial for those people, which is why the financial media tends to “root” for high prices.

But this isn’t systematically true. People who don’t invest in stocks at all can afford to be indifferent to the irrational aspects of stock market fluctuations. And young people who invest in stocks through a 401(k) plan—people like me, say—actually benefit from low stock prices. As the animal spirits get low, stocks get cheaper, which means that the money we’re putting into the 401(k) winds up buying more shares. The ideal scenario for any given person is to save money when the spirits are low and then retire when they’re high. But either way, seeing it as being the president’s job to create an unsustainable speculative mania is silly.

Cracking down on protesters only works if the cops take the incumbent government’s side:

In what analysts here called an unprecedented reversal by security forces, phalanxes of riot policemen here in Lahore melted away rather than continue to confront protesters who had rallied around the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, when he defied a house arrest order early Sunday.

By early evening, the sight of exuberant anti-government crowds in Lahore — a mix of Mr. Sharif’s loyalists, supporters of smaller opposition parties and ordinary people with their young children — encouraged people in other cities in the Punjab Province to come out on the streets

Mr. Sharif headed toward Islamabad in a long convoy of cars, with supporters lining up to greet him along the 200 mile route, said Ahsan Iqbal, the information secretary for Mr. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N. He added that party workers armed with cranes were removing shipping containers placed as roadblocks by the police at junctions along the route to the capital.

Interesting times. The US is trying to broker some kind of accommodation between the contending parties.

I wrote over here that “[i]n the US and in Europe, income level is fairly predictive of voting behavior.” That’s broadly true, but as Andrew Gelman pointed out to me in an email, it obscures some major differences. His book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State includes this graph summarizing international differences in the extent to which high income leads to conservative voting:

I think it’s probably better not to think too much about the Eastern Europe and Latin America cases here and limit our attention to the rich countries. As you can see, it’s generally true that in Western Europe, as in the United States, being rich seems to make you favorable to parties of the right. But there are some exceptions to this rule. And in general, the rich-poor gap is not as sharp as in the US. This is intertwined with the fact that the economic gap between rich and poor is not as large and the fact that the ideological gap between the parties is not as big. In some of these countries, though, I would be interested to know how the parties are being coded. Based on my understanding of the Swiss party system, for example, I’m not sure which party I would label as the “conservative” one—they basically seem to have one left-wing party and then three different flavors of conservative parties.