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Yglesias

Getting Out While the Going Is Good

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 4, 2010 at 3:57 pm

I have no particular opinion about Steve Ballmer, but I sure don’t buy this argument:

406-tumblr_l39pzqmqbc1qz4gevo1_500

It matters who’s at the top. It sets the company tone. Microsoft is undoubtedly full of very smart people, but as long as they are being run by Steve Ballmer, they’re going to be shackled by his ineptitude.

I wish Microsoft had their evil genius back.

If this chart shows anything about the genius of Bill Gates, I would say it’s that he showed a good sense of timing in when it was a good time to get out. I bet that if Gates had some brilliant notion up his sleeve of some thrilling new ways for Microsoft to expand, that he would have stuck around and overseen them. But he didn’t. So he quite wisely decided that he was already a very rich man and he did have ideas on a bunch of other topics, so off he went to do important work tackling global public health and domestic education reform issues.

Health

NYT Story On Dartmouth Health Research Raises As Many Questions About The Paper As It Does About The Studies

By Igor Volsky on Jun 4, 2010 at 3:45 pm

Yesterday’s NYT article questioning the validity of the Dartmouth health spending disparities research has received a good deal of backlash and reiterated my initial reaction that the paper was looking to stir controversy rather than conduct a serious dissection of the Dartmouth analysis.

The Dartmouth researchers have released their own document debunking some of the falsehoods in the NYT piece– for instance, several of the maps do reflect quality of care and they have presented risk-adjusted measures of spending for chronically ill patients — and over at the Health Beat blog, Maggie Mahar tracked down some of the sources in NYT story who claim that their quotes were taken out of context:

- DAVID CUTLER: “Every word is clearly accurate, but the implication is wrong.”

- DR. HOWARD KRUMLORTZ: “What I spent most of the interview trying to convey is that a lot of the back and forth [about bits and pieces of Dartmouth’s data ] is inside baseball stuff – and we are all working hard to figure out how to gauge costs and value better .But Dartmouth’s work on variation is pivotal to moving us forward – and we all agree that there is lots of waste and it is unevenly distributed across the country. ”

- UNNAMED SOURCE WHO SPOKE WITH NYT: “Harris and Abelson were determined to write a story that would ‘take down Dartmouth.”

Mahar also points out that the story could present a conflict of interest, since, as the NYT has explained, “Some proposals in Congress call for using the analysis . . . to begin spending less money on regions where medical care is especially costly, including places like New York City.” ”Manhattan hospitals spend generously on ads in the Times, and this puts the paper in an awkward position,” Mahar notes.

The point here isn’t to completely dismiss the article — after all, complex research often invites its share of uncertainly and critique and the NYT is merely doing its part in airing these concerns. But why is the paper running an inside-baseball dispute about health economics on A1 and using gross generalities to gloss over the intricacies and complexities of the Dartmouth maps? Administration officials may have touted their findings, but this story was published months after Congress passed a health care law that appropriated very little from the Dartmouth research! As one source told Mahar, “It sounds as if it were written by someone’s ex-spouse.”

In the aftermath of reform, reporters have been writing sensational stories about how health care reform is not meeting expectations (even though it’s been just two months) while paying far less attention to the difficulties and challenges of effectively implementing the measure on the state level. And I would argue that the latter is far more significant to the future of the nation than a few momentary gocha controversies that do nothing but generate links from conservative bloggers and get your article entered into the Congressional record by Republican Congressmen.

Alyssa

Exploring the Star Wars Universe Part II: Beyond George Lucas–And The Empire

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 4, 2010 at 3:42 pm

Image used under a Creative Commons license, courtesy of Phillip West.



Part I of what was supposed to be an extended series of posts is here.  Sorry for the delay, guys.


I was reading through the comments on an io9 post about the next Star Wars game when I came across one by a guy who goes by mordicai that I not only agree with, but that crystallizes some things I’ve been thinking:

This is my solution to the Lucas Dilemma. Star Wars is great; we need to free Star Wars by destroying the canon. We need to take whatever we want from Star Wars & leave behind all we don’t want. MORE Star Wars is the answer. Let the expanded universe be good, or even be bad; we just need an ocean of it, enough so that people can pick & choose the details while retaining the core.


The core being “Sweet space ships flying around with robots & aliens while wizard knights with laser swords are all mystical,” I guess.


One of the reasons I’ve been so geeked over the Yuuzhan Vong arc in the Star Wars universe is that it manages to simultaneously preserve and transcend the core narratives and characterizations that make up the franchise.

For the uninitiated, the Yuuzhan Vong arc in the extended Star Wars universe follows the invasion of the galaxy by a race of pain-worshipping humanoids who are immune to the Force.  Their arrival poses a number of challenges to the rules George Lucas set up a long time ago in a movie studio far, far away.  


First, the story suggests limits to the Force, which contradicts our understanding of its basic nature.  That prompts crises of faith for a number of the Jedi characters the arc focuses on, which they respond to in substantially varying ways.  But it’s also a direct challenge to readers who are deeply steeped in the Star Wars mythology.  Lucas set up a very detailed geopolitical conflict, but the Force was the genius conceptual invention that gave life and consequence to that geopolitical conflict, and elevated it above conventional and short-lived science fiction.  Learning that it doesn’t work the way we’ve come to expect forces us to reassess our understanding of a universe in which we’re deeply immersed, and it puts us back on the same footing with Luke Skywalker.  As he’s become the head of a large organization and a global leader, Luke’s become more distant from those of us who are just observers of his trajectory.  Letting both us and him be confused, afraid, and wondrous together restores some of the magic of the initial trilogy when we were learning along with him. 


The Yuuzhan Vong’s arrival also gives us a more detailed and compelling sense of what lies beyond the galaxy, and as a result, helps make the scale of the Empire, and now the Republic.  A big Senate chamber on-screen is still finite, no matter how many floating seating boxes a Sith Lord tosses around it in the course of a battle.  The universe is small enough that we can feel the emotional impact of the destruction of a single planet.  The Yuuzhan Vong destroy many of them, and it’s in the numbing effect of that destruction, and the impotence of characters we’ve come to see as extraordinarily powerful and influential, that it’s possible to grasp the size of this conflict.


And once the magnitude of the threat is clear, there’s a geopolitical shift: the Republic and the Imperial Remnant, the remains of the Empire, which has been living basically separate from the Republic, begin to work together.  In a generation, we’ve progressed from a universal order where the leader of one faction was willing to kill his children who participated in the other, to a world where Imperial and Republican alliances aren’t a barrier to cooperation–or love.  The Yuuzhan Vong invasion, and the revelations of what the Empire knew about the coming attack, even require a reevaluation of what we knew about the conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion, and the Emperor’s motivations (it’s relatively evil to conclude that he was still an evil sumbitch, but harder to read the whole of geopolitics the same way, I think).


In particular the first and the third developments, I think we’ve truly reached a point where George Lucas’s vision is guiding, but no longer confining to the universe’s expansion and development.  And that’s how it should be.  Lucas gave fans an enormous gift in his initial trilogy, but he has limits, both as a conceptual designer, and as an executor of the details that make a movie work, something that was painfully obvious in the prequels.  But fans have provided a will not to let the universe break, even as it bends and changes.  And a host of other authors, continuity-watchers, video game designers, etc., have done a lot of compelling things with that will.  Even within the spectrum of fandoms, I think it’s rare to find a fan community that’s able to accept such fundamental shifts in the guiding concepts and laws that govern the universe in which they’ve made their investments.  I think that’s a testament, both to our dedication, and to what we’ve been given as a reward for it.

Yglesias

McCartney Mocks Bush, Boehner Demands Apology

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 4, 2010 at 3:14 pm

As you may have heard, Paul McCartney recently became the first non-American to be awarded the Gershwin Prize for popular song. At the ceremony, he cracked a joke at the expensive of hideously unpopular failed president George W Bush, quipping “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a President who knows what a library is.” This prompted a furious response from Human Events and House Minority Leader John Boehner:

When did decorum go out of style?

“Like millions of other Americans, I have always had a good impression of Paul McCartney and thought of him as a classy guy, but I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of grace and respect he displayed at the White House,” Boehner told HUMAN EVENTS. “I hope he’ll apologize to the American people for his conduct which demeaned him, the White House and President Obama.”

McCartney is the third recipient of the Gershwin Prize. Hailing from England and having earned no university degrees of his own, the Beatle may not know W. was the first American president to earn a master’s degree in business administration. (The fact the MBA is from Harvard really irks the left.) Not to mention Bush is married to a librarian.

I think the interesting thing here is that conservatives are frequently pretending to dislike George W Bush and his policies, but at the end of the day they just can’t quit the man or stop defending his honor and his legacy. His economic priorities—help rich people pay less taxes, let business rum amok—are theirs. His religious-inflected strain of violent nationalism is theirs. His love of violence is theirs. If they return to government, they will continue with Bush-style policies and we’ll get Bush-style results.

Politics

Boehner Defends Bush, Demands That Paul McCartney ‘Apologize’ For His Crack At The Former President

By Ben Armbruster on Jun 4, 2010 at 3:00 pm

boehner-cryingThis week, President Obama awarded former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney with the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. “[It has been] nearly half a century since four lads from Liverpool first landed on our shores and changed everything overnight,” Obama said, commemorating McCartney’s influence on American culture. At the end of the ceremony, Sir Paul appeared to offer praise of Obama while taking a jab at President Bush. “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is,” he said.

The view that Obama is more of an intellectual than Bush is one that many well-known figures publicly hold — including the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. Nevertheless, House Minority John Boehner (R-OH) found McCartney’s opinion too much to handle, and demanded that he apologize:

“Like millions of other Americans, I have always had a good impression of Paul McCartney and thought of him as a classy guy, but I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of grace and respect he displayed at the White House,” Boehner told HUMAN EVENTS. “I hope he’ll apologize to the American people for his conduct which demeaned him, the White House and President Obama.”

The House Minority Leader finds it somehow politically advantageous to not only defend the deeply unpopular former president but also attack Paul McCartney — a cultural icon, a member of one of the most successful and popular rock bands in history, and essentially a non-political figure. But this sort of petty political attack is nothing new for conservatives:

– Newt Gingrich recently called religious leaders socialists because they supported Obama’s health care reform effort.

– Bush administration officials objected to awarding Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom they claimed the books promoted witchcraft. Bill O’Reilly once wondered if Rowling is trying to indoctrinate children with “the gay agenda” because her books have a gay character.

– Conservatives pressured Build-A-Bear to take down educational videos on manmade climate change.

– The right wing was outraged at Pixar’s film “Wall-E” — a story about a lonely robot’s quest for love, as he is left to clean up a trashed earth — calling it “leftist propaganda” and “Malthusian fear mongering.”

– Media “critics” Newsbusters attacked legendary rock band The Eagles because their new album is allegedly “one long, sustained attack on the integrity of the United States” that doesn’t have “a word about Islamofascists trying to blow us all up.”

– Bush Education Secretary Margaret Spellings wrote a letter to PBS chastising the network for airing a children’s show that featured children with two moms.

– Fox News’ Neil Cavuto called the animated film “Happy Feet” “offensive” and “far left” propaganda because the film’s penguin characters have trouble finding food because of overfishing and oil drilling.

And of course, Glenn Beck recently attacked the President’s 11 year-old daughter Malia, suggesting that she is not intelligent for her age.

Given the right-wing’s history of these petty attacks, and now Boehner’s condemnation of the infamous Paul McCartney, is there anyone conservatives won’t vilify to make a political point?

Update

The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen notes:

The same day McCartney told a harmless joke about George W. Bush’s limited intellect, George W. Bush boasted about having ordered torture as president, and insisted he wouldn’t change a thing if he had it to do over again.

So, just so we’re clear, a musician telling a Bush-is-dumb joke generates a fair amount of outrage in some conservative circles. A former president admitting to ordering torture — bragging about utilizing a technique that the United States has long considered criminal, and has even prosecuted — is completely fine.

One, in Boehner’s mind, requires an apology; the other is a source of partisan pride.

Climate Progress

The BP Disaster Is Cheney’s Katrina

By Josh Dorner on Jun 4, 2010 at 2:40 pm

Cheney's KatrinaThe Energy Policy Act of 2005, signed by President George W. Bush on August 8, 2005, achieved many of the goals set out by Cheney’s secret task force in 2001 and ushered in a new era of deregulation, self-regulation, and utter disregard for environmental and safety laws. It also coincided with a culture of deep and widespread corruption at the Interior Department, including the Minerals Management Service. This era unquestionably set the stage for the BP oil catastrophe — Cheney’s Katrina.

With two oilmen in the White House and two more Texans leading an emboldened Republican majority in the House of Representatives, Big Oil had an unprecedented opportunity to set U.S. energy policy. Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Task Force concluded in May 2001:

Advanced, more energy-efficient drilling and production methods: reduce emissions; practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms; and enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources.

Fortunately, the Democratically controlled Senate prevented final passage of a bill during the 107th Congress from January 2001 to January 2003. After Republicans took the Senate in 2003, oil-funded House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) pushed for an even more sweeping bill that fulfilled the pro-oil blueprint crafted by Cheney’s secret energy task force. After months of intense debate, a bipartisan filibuster in the Senate barely killed the bill.

In 2005, after retaking the White House and increasing their majorities in both houses of Congress with the help of over $2.5 million in oil money, Bush and Cheney worked with oil-funded Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) to pass yet another bill that included tens of billions in subsidies for Big Oil and other forms of dirty energy and dozens of other provisions to reduce or eliminate royalties paid by Big Oil to taxpayers, waive or eliminate environmental and safety reviews, and otherwise enhance Big Oil’s ability to exploit our natural resources with little or no oversight and with maximum profit. Andrew Lundquist, the executive director of Cheney’s energy task force, left government to actively lobby for the legislation on behalf of BP and other energy companies.

One of the worst elements of what has come to be known as the “Dick Cheney energy bill” had a direct role in eliminating the kind of regulatory oversight that may have prevented the blowout of BP’s Mississippi Canyon 252 well on April 20 of this year:

Section 390 of the legislation dramatically expanded the circumstances under which drilling operations could forgo environmental reviews and be approved almost immediately under so-called “categorical exclusions” from the National Environmental Policy Act.

The use of such exclusions went on to widespread abuse under the Bush administration. BP’s blown-out well did not undergo an environmental review thanks to a categorical exclusion. BP was lobbying as recently as April to expand the use of such exclusions.

The expansion of categorical exclusions in the bill is far from the only giveaway to Big Oil at the expense of the environment and taxpayers. Cheney’s energy bill also relieved oil companies of paying royalties to the taxpayers for millions of barrels of oil produced from deepwater wells (Sec. 345), weakened states’ ability under the Coastal Zone Management Act to have a say in projects and federal activities that affect their coasts including limiting appeals related to pipeline construction or offshore oil development (Sec. 381-82), and created a loophole to allow oil companies to drill under a national seashore by transferring the mineral rights to private ownership or ownership by the state of Texas (Sec. 373).

Read the extended version of this post at the Center for American Progress.

Yglesias

More Can Be Done on Jobs

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 4, 2010 at 2:28 pm

Correctly understood, the lesson of today’s somewhat disappointing jobs report is that with super-high unemployment, government policy can easily create jobs. After all, imagine the state we’d be in if this weren’t a census year and those 411,000 census workers hadn’t been hired. Does anyone think that if they hadn’t been hired, the private sector would have magically conjured up 411,000 additional jobs? Where would they have come from? On the contrary, the private sector would have been even worse off as those 411,000 people would have had less money to spend. And as Annie Lowrey writes, there’s a ton that could be done to mitigate the anti-stimulus currently flowing from state and local government:

Washington has not run out of options to tackle the unemployment crisis. The government could expand, directly hiring workers. (As the census demonstrates, when the government hires workers, unemployment goes down.) It could push tax incentives and stimulus, so that Americans spend more and companies decide to hire more workers. It could take up Rep. George Miller’s (D-Calif.) Local Jobs for America Act, providing $75 billion to local governments to keep employees on the payroll. Or it could have considered Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) proposal to grant $23 billion to keep public school teachers in their classrooms, the Keep Our Educators Working Act.

Any and all of this would be a good idea.

Politics

Right-wing ‘media watchdog’ is outraged that ‘Glee’ doesn’t have friendly homophobic characters.

By Lee Fang on Jun 4, 2010 at 2:02 pm

L. Brent Bozell III, right-wing scion and president of the conservative “media watchdog” group the Media Research Center, wrote a column today in TownHall to express his absolute outrage at the television show “Glee” for promoting a “homosexual lifestyle.” Bozell, whose “think-tank” is funded by foundation money from David and Julie Koch of the oil conglomerate Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, among other corporate sources, denounced the show for portraying opponents of homosexuality as “vicious school bullies.” Bozell lamented the fact that that Glee’s homophobes were “two brutish football players” who “threatened to pummel the openly gay and riotously effeminate character Kurt for dressing up like a girl”:

“Bill O’Reilly recently hosted a “culture warriors” segment at Fox News where both “warriors” agreed that homosexuality is morally acceptable. That same no-debate mentality has been a regular drumbeat on the Fox television series “Glee,” a musical drama/comedy about a high school glee club in Lima, Ohio. [...] The only characters on the show disapproving of homosexuality are vicious school bullies. In the May 25 episode, two brutish football players threatened to pummel the openly gay and riotously effeminate character Kurt for dressing up like a girl. Everyone else in this series approves, endorses or participates in the homosexual lifestyle.“

While it may seem astounding that Bozell found the urge to whine that “this show has presented gay as the ‘new normal,’” and that “Glee” lacks enough friendly gay-bashers, his complaints are par for the course for his organization, which is considered a mainstream conservative establishment. Yesterday, Bozell’s bloggers tried to drum up an absurd conspiracy theory, accusing Time magazine of printing a picture of the World Cup logo that looks “strikingly like that of the Obama logo.”

Yglesias

Cars Are Expensive, Poor People Need Transit

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 4, 2010 at 1:45 pm

DC Streetcar - rollout - 2010-05-05 a

Mike DeBonis has an excellent article about Vincent Gray’s streetcar flipflop and the blog-led activist backlash against him. But I do want to object to the characterization of people with a stake in seeing improved mass transit as “well-off, mostly white, living in gentrifying neighborhoods and inclined to vote.” It’s of course true that the audience for the Greater Greater Washington blog is, like the audience for all blogs, largely well-educated and affluent. But the substance of the mass transit issue is primarily a topic of concern for poor people. After all, to state the obvious cars are expensive. Not just expensive to buy, but expensive to maintain, insure, fuel, etc. It’s cheaper to take the bus or ride Metro.

Indeed, if you think about it it’s precisely the fact that mass transit generally serves a downscale politically disempowered constituency that explains why it’s difficult to win generous funding for it. The emergence of interest in improved transit services among a slice of high-SES Washingtonians is a noteworthy political development that should benefit the city’s low-income residents.

Economy

Chamber Of Commerce, Business Roundtable Claim To Be Persuading Senate To Keep Tax Loopholes Open

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 4, 2010 at 1:40 pm

When the Senate returns from its Memorial Day recess on Monday, one of the first items on the docket is a tax extenders bill passed by the House last week that extends unemployment benefits and many popular tax credits, like the Research and Development credit.

The bill is partially offset by two tax changes: closing the loophole that allows wealthy money managers to pay the lower capital gains rate on their income (called “carried interest”) and no longer allowed multinational corporations to claim tax credits on earnings that they keep overseas.

The House has repeatedly passed the carried interest change over the last few years, and has shown more willingness to aggressively pursue closing loopholes for big corporations. Therefore, the big business lobby, led by the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, has its sights set on the Senate, in the hopes of preventing the changes:

Interest groups from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the American Institute of Architects are counting on their Senate allies to alter the revenue-raising offsets passed by the House as part of a package of tax cuts and benefit extensions…[L]obbyists are trying to force some combination of carveouts, scalebacks and delays to the revenue-raising provisions that the House passed.

Business Roundtable President John Castellani said “there is a group of senators who have been ‘very supportive of making sure that U.S. companies are competitive internationally,’ but did not name names.”

As Zaid Jilani noted, lobbyists are saying that the carried interest change will target everyone from cancer patients to pensioners, based on the false claim that it will be a direct tax on investment. And the Senate has been steadily watering down the provision, suggesting that only 50 or 60 percent of carried interest should be subject to income tax rates.

But make no mistake: this is a change aimed at ensuring that incredibly wealthy people who manage money for others pay the same income tax rates as everyone else. As Citizens for Tax Justice explained, “the change affects only the managers of venture capital funds. It doesn’t change how the investors are taxed.”

As for the corporate tax change, it remains the case that a $100 billion annual tax burden is shifted onto the tax-paying population by tax avoidance. Allowing corporations to claim U.S. credits for profits they never repatriate creates no incentive for ever bringing that money back. As House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Sander Levin said, the status quo is “tilting the playing field in favor of investment overseas.”

With deficit hysteria currently gripping Capitol Hill, and the right-wing fearmongering about every little tax increase anyone suggests, raising revenue from common sense places is critical. Closing these loopholes, which only benefit the very wealthy and huge corporations, is a good place to start.

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