Shoutingatmytv.com

Halperin - Again...

Here's the note I sent to the staff at Morning Joe this afternoon, after watching this segment, which has also appeared since on Huffington Post:

Dear Morning Joe staff -

This morning's show had a segment in it in which Time's Mark Halperin opined that the lack of Republican votes for the stimulus bill was Pres. Obama's fault, because he didn't work hard enough to pass a bill that appealed to Republicans instead of Democrats.

Let's leave aside for the moment that those Democrats just won a decisive electoral victory on the question of who is better equipped to solve the nation's economic problems. Let's also leave aside that most economists agree that the spending proposals in the stimulus package are much more likely to provide stimulus than the tax cuts that the Republicans (surprise, surprise) insist are the solution (as usual).

Let's just note that before the bill ever got considered in the house, the administration put in hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts that rank and file Democrats (and many Democratic Congresspeople) objected to strenuously, and then made several other changes to the bill that Republicans wanted before the vote. The response to these accommodations? 0 Republican votes.

Halperin seems to have missed all of this. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I'm not - Halperin's been a shill for the dumbest, most partisan parts of the Republican party for years.

I am, however, amazed that you can still take him seriously, and disappointed that nobody else on the panel saw fit to note the administration's compromises either. You can (and usually do) do better.

If you saw it, please write them. If you didn't, watch the clip on the HuffPo page, and then write them. Halperin has a long history of this garbage (ABC's The Note, which he produced for years, was a primary supporter of all the idiocies of the Bush administration), and it's worth spending a few electrons and a few seconds to push back against his slanted reporting, to see that it is recognized for what it is. Otherwise, he's dangerous.

Update: From the comments on Steve Benen's post about this same stupidity - "In other news, water is still wet."

Mmmm... Data. Yum!

Here's a great PDF of a paper on the stimulus effects of different types of spending. Based on the Dept of Commerce's "Input-Output Model" of analyzing these effects, the paper compares the stimulative effect of defense spending with that of tax cuts, as well as with spending on health care, education, mass transit, and construction for home weatherization and infrastructure.

The short version is that mass transit creates more jobs than any other type of spending considered, and provides better economic multiplier effects than anything other than education spending. The only thing that does less than defense spending to stimulate the economy is, you guessed it... tax cuts!

So why is the mass transit portion of the stimulus bill getting shafted again and again in Congress? It's doing well by doing good to spend the money there - what's the problem?

Apropos of Very Little in Particular...

I just saw a link to this wonderful essay by George Orwell, entitled Politics and the English Language. I had read it before, but it's one of those gems that's worth taking out and looking at again from time to time.

Anthem

Norman Lear has provided another among several great services to his country. Go listen to this.

A Blog Post With Some Reach!

Yesterday, I wrote something that probably tripled the total number of people in my life that have read something I wrote. Here it is.

Unfortunately, it was a quick note to Josh Marshall, and the first paragraph is badly phrased. I described the US Air ditching in the Hudson on Thursday afternoon as being less "last minute" than many commercial airliner ditchings, but that's not true. What is true is that the US Air plane was under impressive control throughout the ditching, partly due to the early decision to ditch and the planning that went into executing the water landing.

The landing itself was really something - this morning, the mayor's office released a surveillance video that shows a textbook ditch - tail down, as slow as possible. Capt. Sullenburger also appears to have kept the plane from spinning, which is even more impressive once you realize that the plane appears to have lost one engine as it landed, creating uneven drag on one side of the plane.

Sullenburger is a true hero, and saved a lot of lives on Thursday (he'll never buy a drink in a bar with another pilot in it again, I'll bet).

As someone else pointed out on TPM, a lot of credit also should go to the ferry captains who acted so quickly to get people off the plane. This video shows that there was only about four minutes from the time of the impact to the arrival of the first ferry, and there were two there in six minutes and four by nine minutes after the crash. All of those ferries got up to the plane slowly, safely, and ready to take passengers off, and that's not easy in a large vessel either.

Bravo to all. What a great story!

Too Much Highway Money, Not Enough Mass Transit

The WSJ reports today on the balance of the expenditures in the new stimulus bill, and the brou-ha-ha it's causing in the House. House Democrats are upset with the priorities realized in the bill, and they should be.

The transportation component of the bill is a lot less than the House asked for, and the allocations are backwards, with highways receiving more than double the amount dedicated to mass transit. Even worse, there is no priority in the bill for repair projects over new construction, so it's entirely possible that the existing roads and bridges that need repair will get passed over in favor of new highway and bridge construction.

This is a mistake. The stimulus money won't provide anywhere near the same value if it doesn't provide stimulus to those parts of the economy that will help wean us off of our dependence on oil, and a massive highway building program is moving in exactly the wrong direction. Let's hope the House Democrats can tweak this part of the bill.

Undead Business Tax Breaks

Talking Points Memo has a piece up today about one of the business tax breaks that seem to be likely to be included in Obama’s stimulus package. It’s called the “net operating loss (NOL) carryback”, and it was kept out of the Democratic foreclosures bill in the spring, but for some reason, it’s back.

The “NOL carryback” proposal is one of those obscure schemes that gets lost in the rest of the sausage when tax policy gets discussed, but it shouldn’t, as the TPM article explains. Under current law, an operating loss in a particular year can be “carried back” to generate a refund for taxes paid on profits in the two prior years. The proposal currently on the table from the Obama team would extend that carryback for five years, dramatically increasing the amounts of tax that would be forgiven and the size of the cash payments made to those businesses which lost money this year.

That might not be so bad in and of itself (after all, borrowing money to bail out businesses is all we’ve done so far to slow the collapse of the financial system), but in this case, the folks who would get rewarded are exactly those who made fortunes off of the housing bubble in the first place, and those payments would have exactly no positive effects on the economy as a whole. The carryback institutionalizes the competitive disadvantage of behaving responsibly, it’s the purest form of socializing losses and privatizing profits that we’ve seen yet, and it’s a terrible idea, as the Wall Street Journal, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities both explain in some detail (both these links are in the TPM piece, as is this scathing indictment from Daniel Gross in Slate last spring).

TPM once again gets high marks for its reporting of this mess, and it would be a great thing if someone would ask those senators who are supporting this gift (including Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, Debbie Stabenow, and Kent Conrad) to explain if there’s any other reason they think it’s a good idea beside producing a big chunk of pork for big homebuilders and banks who have already gotten $350 billion of taxpayer money that has produced none of the liquidity it was supposed to produce.

Ink By The Barrel

Anne Coulter's pre-emption from yesterday's Today show is selling books briskly, I'm sure - Coulter is certainly working it for all she's worth (okay, more than she's worth). This piece on Huffinghton Post runs down the story and the clips that cover the ground - pretty amusing.

Coulter was bumped for Tony Blair yesterday, and immediately began to whine about lefty media bias (despite the fact that she has been polluting the airwaves with her bile on every channel for years). This morning, the Today show had her on, and Matt Lauer addressed the matter with her. Coulter did her best to be snide, but I'd say she came out of it the worse for wear (imagine my distress), and NBC appears not to be done with her yet (as evidence, see this hilarious excerpt from Morning Joe).

Mark Twain famously (and possibly apocryphally) said about taking on a newspaper publisher; "never get into an argument with a man who buys ink by the barrel". The modern equivalent appears to be "never get into an argument with an organization that buys bandwidth by the yard". Progressives have been on the losing end of this axiom all too often (see this piece about Obama's possible Surgeon General pick Sanjay Gupta's CNN hit piece on Michael Moore's Sicko for an example), so it's nice to see it works the other way from time to time too.

Panetta

The leaking of Barack Obama's selection of Leon Panetta for Director of Central Intelligence caused a good deal of fuss over the weekend. This piece by William Bradley provides a good synopsis of the DCI-designee's history, and notes a couple of reasons why the fuss. None of those reasons redound to the credit of those doing the fussing, and as others have said, the nature of the bitching about this pick and the nature and histories of the people doing the bitching are both good arguments for why Obama should stick with Panetta.

And he went to school where I did, so he must be a genius. :)

Hansen Speaks

Noted NASA climatologist James Hansen has an open letter to Barack and Michelle Obama posted over at Grist. Worth a read.