Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Not all heroes wear capes.

The house always wins.

Nevertheless, she persisted

We still have time to mess this up!

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Wetsuit optional.

Han shot first.

Also, too.

How has Obama failed you today?

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

The revolution will be supervised.

Too inconsequential to be sued

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Mission Accomplished!

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

The Math Demands It!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Bernard Finel

Boston

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In 2004, John Kerry responded to a question about terrorism by noting, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.”

Bush made hay out of this quote, but Kerry was absolutely right.

The Boston bombing was a human tragedy, but in the grand scheme of things… A nuisance. More people died in the Texas fertilizer plant fire.

That said, a lot of people are going to look at the case and somehow see this as something more, something bigger. We’re going to hear a lot about immigration and even more about radicalization.

Unfortunately, most of what we’re going to hear is just dead wrong. I’ve spent a lot of time working on the issue of “radicalization.” I can’t claim my views are widely accepted, but I’d argue the empirics support my view.

Anyway, my view is this: Radicalization is epiphenomenal and opportunistic, and hence not a useful focus of policy response.

In terms of being epiphenomenal, you will find that almost all case of radicalization follow rather than cause personal crisis. Individuals who are “radicalized” and turn to terrorism often already have money woes, job loss, the collapse of relationships, or the onset of psychological symptoms, at the very least depression and anxiety disorders, but often paranoid schizophrenia.

In terms of opportunism… Radicalized individuals are usually people who have, essentially, been emptied out by personal crisis. For some, radical Islamist ideology fills the gaps. For others it is booze or sex or drugs or suicide. Anyway, we’re not talking about master criminals, working at the behest of brilliant external puppet masters. We’re talking about broken individuals who are not just manipulated, but eager to be manipulated to give their lives meaning.

It is a sad and tragic situation. It is particularly tragic for the victims. But from a societal perspective it is a nuisance.

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Yeah, one is just like the other…

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Wow, just wow:

In the increasingly confrontational debate over the nation’s gun laws, two female archetypes have emerged.

There’s the grieving mother whose child was killed in a shooting and whose pleas for stricter regulation seem unassailable. And there’s the flinty mother who wants maximum firepower to take matters into her own hands to protect her brood.

Yeah, so a parent whose child was actually murdered is equivalent to a crazy woman who has fantasies of fighting off a horde of home invaders.

It was precisely Nancy Lanza’s unhinged fantasies that allowed Newtown to happen. The Newtown shootings happened because a mentally ill young man had easy access to guns because his mother was a lunatic prepper. Gayle Trotter is not a legitimate counter to the parents whose children were murdered in their classroom. Gayle Trotter is Nancy Lanza. She’s not a potential victim just trying to defend herself. She’s a dangerous lunatic who thinks that the rest of us have to suffer the occasional mass murder just so she can indulge her paranoid delusions.

You’d think the “liberal Washington Post” could see the difference between the moral standing of the two “archtypes”… but alas, no.

 

 

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The Emerging al Qaeda Narrative

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The attack on the natural gas facility in Algeria this past week has reopened the debate over the demise of al Qaeda. The WaPo, being as usual fair and balanced, quotes extensively GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, who naturally sees Algeria as a failure for the Obama Administration:

As American troops prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan in the next two years, ending a conflict that started as an effort to crush al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Washington and other Western capitals face the grim threat of a virulent new al-Qaeda wing capable of a broad reach.

“They are growing more dangerous. They are growing in numbers,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” show Sunday.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Rogers described the attack on an energy complex in Algeria as a strategic victory for the al-Qaeda branch — commonly known as AQIM — with echoes of a militant assault on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in September that killed the ambassador and three other Americans.

“This is on the heels of Benghazi . . . this becomes a recruiting dream for them and a nightmare for us,” Rogers told The Post. “It shows that they can strike Western targets and gives them a confidence level.” [Emphasis mine]

Reading this, it is tempting to forget that this most recent attack did not actually occur in the West. Indeed, it did not even occur anywhere near any urban centers or centers of Algerian governmental power. The closest town to the facility seems to be the bustling metropolis of Gadamis, Libya, population roughly 10,000.

What the attack in Algeria demonstrates, if anything, is that a radical Islamist group was able to mobilize a couple of dozen guys and some heavy weapons to attack a facility fairly isolated in the depths of the Algerian wilderness. Why this represents a “grim threat… of a broad reach” is wholly unclear to me.

Ah, but,

A week of violence in Algeria and Mali has transformed al-Qaeda’s North Africa branch into a cause celebre for militant Islamists around the globe, boosting recruitment and fundraising for the jihadists and spurring fears of further terrorist attacks in the region and beyond.

Even after suffering tactical defeats in both countries in recent days, the movement known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is being lionized in Internet chat rooms and in official statements by extremist groups, some of which are urging reprisal campaigns against Western interests. [Emphasis mine]

So, the evidence that this is a massive defeat for the Obama Administration is internet chat and press statements. Who knew we internet posters and commenters were so damned important?

I don’t want to diminish this overly. Many innocent people lost their lives. It is a real tragedy for their families. But the idea that this represents some major reversal in the largely successful struggle to minimize the threat from al Qaeda is bizarre.

 

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The Best Health Care System in the World

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From Harold Meyerson in the WaPo:

January has turned out to be a banner month for fans of American exceptionalism. As documented in voluminous detail in a 404-page report released last week by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, Americans lead shorter lives than Western Europeans, Australians, Japanese and Canadians. Of the 17 countries measured, the United States placed dead last in life expectancy, even though we lead the planet in the amount we spend on health care (17.6 percent of gross domestic product in 2010 vs. 11.6 percent each for France and Germany). We get radically less bang for the buck than comparable nations. If that’s not exceptionalism, I don’t know what is.

….

But a funny thing happens to Americans’ life expectancy when they age. The U.S. mortality rate is the highest of the 17 nations until Americans hit 50 and the second-highest until they hit 70. Then our mortality ranking precipitously shifts: By the time American seniors hit 80, they have some of the longest life expectancies in the world.

What gives? Have seniors discovered the Fountain of Youth? Do U.S. geriatricians outpace all our other physicians?

Part of the answer is Darwinian: Those Americans who have been less able to access reliable medical care, maintain good diets and live in neighborhoods that are not prey to gun violence have disproportionately died off before age 80. That isn’t natural selection but social selection — the survival of the economically fittest in a nation that rations longevity by wealth.

But the larger part of the answer is that at age 65, Americans enter a health-care system that ceases to be exceptional when compared with the systems in the other 16 nations studied. They leave behind the private provision of medical coverage, forsake the genius of the market and avail themselves of universal medical insurance. For the first time, they are beneficiaries of the same kind of social policy that their counterparts in other lands enjoy. And presto, change-o: Their life expectancy catches up with and eventually surpasses those of the French, Germans, Britons and Canadians.

Interestingly, of course, Medicare is not only provides better health outcomes than the rest of the system in the aggregate, but it also controls costs better. And it could control costs even better if the Republicans would stop screaming “death panels!” for just a few minutes.

But… but… but… freedom! Ugh.

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Our Long National Nightmare…

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… of actually having a Democratic Secretary of Defense in a Democratic administration will soon be coming to an end when Chuck Hagel is confirmed. Assuming Hagel serves out Obama’s second term, we will have had a Democrat as SecDef for precisely 19 months out of the past 20 years running from Clinton’s second term to the end of Obama’s admin.

I actually like Chuck Hagel… but, you know, I vote for Democrats because I like the idea of having actual, no shit, Democrats in charge of important stuff, like the Fed and DoD. Call me crazy if you will. I have to admit, this is a better situation than having Michele Flournoy in charge, but we actually have a reasonably deep bench of very qualified folks — John Hamre, Richard Danzig, Sam Nunn, Wes Clark, Ash Carter, etc.

It rubs me the wrong way.

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Gun Nuts are Sometimes Really Nuts

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As it turns out, “gun nuts” is not just about being crazy about guns, it is also apparently often about being actually insane. Imani and John’s posts link to some examples, but many of you have probably seen this as well (via TPM):

Genuine derangement. And very, very scary.

 

UPDATE: And yet another fun case: Men armed with rifles walk through Portland to ‘educate’

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The Art of the Possible

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And once more into the breach:

Can you tell me the difference between these alternative proposals to increase federal revenue?

1) Allow all Bush tax cuts to expire bringing back Clinton era rates for everyone.

2) Extend all the Bush tax cuts for people making under $400k, and make up the difference by closing the carried interest loophole, eliminating the cap on social security contributions, create new tax brackets with higher rates for the wealthy, completely rewrite the corporate tax code to better tax profits, and pass a carbon tax.

Well, I can see a few differences. In terms of policy, options 2 would be much, much better. It would better address income inequality, it would place the burden of new taxes largely on the wealthy. Rewriting the corporate tax code to generate more revenue while lowering rates is actually quite plausible and would eliminate a lot of problematic incentives for perverse behavior (hoarding cash off shore, for instance).

But until Dec. 31, option 1 had one amazing advantage. It was actually, you know, doable. It was, furthermore, doable by doing nothing. And had we done nothing and allowed everything to lapse, then it might have been possible to pass a lot of the items under option 2 because you could pass them with tradeoffs against Clinton era rates.

In other words, if you are living under Clinton era rates, with a decent federal government revenue stream, you can pass a lot of option 2 items in ways that are revenue neutral. Once the Bush tax cuts are permanent, everything under option 2 has to be a be revenue generator, an explicit tax increase.

So, even if the idea is a whole slew of tax reforms to increase progressivity, it would still have been easier to get there from a Clinton-era baseline rather than a Bush-era one.

I have a lot of sympathy for all of the vigorous criticisms leveled at my last couple of posts, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of the comments reflect what we wish would happen rather than what is actually politically feasible. Again, the huge, incredible advantage of letting the Bush cuts lapse was that it was actually something that could have been done to raise revenue even in the face of absolute GOP obstruction.

Finally, I want to address another theme that came up repeatedly, that is the notion that all argument based on percentage of GDP are flawed because GDP is, essentially, malleable if we pursue wise policies. In other words, some folks seem to feel my focus on increasing revenue is misguided, and that it would be wiser to focus on such things as education and infrastructure and income inequality because if we fix those, the economy will grow faster, making all our current programs affordable even if revenue as a percentage of GDP stays low.

Um…maybe, but I have to admit it feels like magical thinking to me. It’s a liberal version of “dynamic scoring.” As a practical matter, economic growth over the medium term is largely constrained by population profiles and productivity increases. I don’t doubt that you might be able able to squeeze some fraction of a percent of additional growth from the economy through infrastructure and other spending, but I have to admit, I’m highly skeptical that you could generate enough growth to not only cover the costs of these new initiatives, but also close a 3-7% of GDP sized structural deficit.

So I’ll come back to my main argument. I think we need more tax revenue. I think we missed an opportunity to lock in higher tax revenue. And I just don’t see a plausible political path to pass new measures that even come close to making up for the cost of a permanent extension of the vast majority of the Bush cuts.

Now again, you might feel we it was the right thing to do, that the economy is too fragile, and too many people living close to the edge to risk it, and I won’t argue with you strongly.

Regardless, what’s done is done. But the new reality is that the next decade is likely to be dominated by repeated cuts to programs as a result because revenue is just too low right now. That’s the structure of the game, so to speak.

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