Newshoggers.com

Value of Safe Seat Primaries?

By Fester:

Two years ago, in April 2006, I projected a Democratic House caucus in which I that it would be an effective governing majority.  This week's losses on FISA capitulation and the ineffectiveness of following up on Scott McClellan testimony concerning the highly probable systemic obstruction of justice in the Plame case reinforce that basic point.  I had laid out a decision checklist on backing aggressive primary challengers for 2008 in order to seek better Democrats or at the very least more pliable from a progressive angle Democrats.  I think the three major primary challengers to Democratic incumbents that netroots activists funded met my criteria.  However these challengers have not appreciably changed the incentive structure for Democratic Congresscritters and I am curious if one element of my decision matrix is wrong:

Does the incumbent come from a safe district with a high Democratic PVI advantage?

I am questioning the value of restricting the challenge list to safe seat Democrats.  Chris Bowers has the revised and expanded Bush Dog list of Democrats who voted for FISA immunity, amnesia and repeal of significant elements of the Church reforms as well as voting to fund Iraq with no strings attached.  These Democrats come from districts that range from R+18 to D+17.  The traditional techniques would be focused on the highly Democratic districts on the theory that  losing any seat would be unacceptable and areas such as Prince George County, Maryland will not elect a Republican no matter what.  This system gives a pass to swing and tough seat Democrats.   Unfortunately that is enough seats to allow for very bad laws to go through while our intelligence is insulted.  It has not worked in changing the incentive structure of tough votes. 

In 2006 we did not know if the Democratic House leadership would run the House under the majority of the majority system or the majority of the whole system.  Majority of the whole greatly favors conservative Democrats as they can credibly threaten to defect on any deal and create a second option with the Republican caucus.  We have seen this conservative governing coalition dominate the Iraq war debate.  Giving conservative Democrats from tough seats a pass enables Republican favored policies to pass the House.  We need to rethink this.

High Republican PVI districts that are represented by Democrats, especially newer Democrats who do not have long standing relationships to the area require a Democratic incumbent to line all of their ducks in a row and hope the GOP is locally screwed if they are to be re-elected.  This means the liberals within the representative's winning coalition must be willing to work their tails off for a candidate who will routinely screw them over at the local and national level.   

If we assume that all office holders base their votes on some calculus of personal principal/policy preferences and political calculation, liberal/progressive netroots activists can change the formulation of the political calculation so that soft principal votes become more calculation votes in order to maintain the liberal wing of the electoral coalition. 

Assuming Democrats pick up double digit House seats this fall to improve the cushion, the threat of losing one to five R+10 or worse seats because of liberal opposition may be a worthwhile trade-off.  As a defensive action, electing and enabling conservative Democrats was a necessary first step but it is an insufficient step to changing the political calculus and trends within American politics.  It is time to find better leaders either through new candidates supported by new nodes of power, or by changing the existing political power matrix.  And challenging conservative Democrats in conservative seats from the left will force change even at, or more truthfully, because of the highly probable net loss of seats that this type of action would force. 

Zombie Bush will live forever

By Fester:

Paul Krugman in his column today notes that the Bush administration tax cuts and squanderous fiscal policy has produced a political poison pill that greatly reduces future option space:

I realized that the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration are, in effect, a fiscal poison pill aimed at future administrations. True, the tax cuts won’t prevent a change in management — the Constitution sees to that. But they will make it hard for the next president to change the country’s direction.... Anyway, back to my main theme: looking at the tax proposals of the two presidential candidates, it’s remarkable and disheartening to see how effective President Bush’s fiscal poison pill has been in restricting the terms of debate.

And why be shocked at this realization. It is the same pattern of behavior that is driving the negoatiations for the Status of Forces agreement in Iraq --- lock the next admininstration into Bush's prefered course of action by creating institutional inertia behind a horrendous policy set.

And why be shocked at the SOFA --- it is the same pattern of behavior that we have seen with the changing criteria of Republican judges since the Reagan Era --- find reaonably pliant and pliable young judges without a whole lot of paper trail but the right right wing credentials and seat them on the court for thirty to forty years.

All of these steps are attempts to create gatekeepers and to charge economic, political and military rents even after the policy's support has collapsed. And it is a pattern of behavior that is to be expected.

The relevant question is how to deal with these rent seeking opportunities? I have little faith in the Democratic Congress to stand for its prerogatives by insisting that the SOFA as a full fledged security guarantee is and should be voted upon as a treaty in the Senate. I have little faith in the Congress in standing for the Constitution as Glenn Greenwald so ably demonstrates today.

I have little faith that these poison pills will be spat out and crushed in time's dust.

Your Subserviance is now required....

By Fester:

TSA has a new policy that is not a security policy.  It is a policy of ritualistic humiliation and subservience enforcement. 

Beginning Saturday, June 21, 2008 passengers that willfully refuse to provide identification at security checkpoint will be denied access to the secure area of airports. This change will apply exclusively to individuals that simply refuse to provide any identification or assist transportation security officers in ascertaining their identity.

This new procedure will not affect passengers that may have misplaced, lost or otherwise do not have ID but are cooperative with officers. Cooperative passengers without ID may be subjected to additional screening protocols, including enhanced physical screening, enhanced carry-on and/or checked baggage screening, interviews with behavior detection or law enforcement officers and other measures. [emphasis mine] (Via Outside the Beltway)

So if I am understanding this press release correctly the policy is that if an individual is nice and subservient to a TSA official, an arrangement can be made, but if the individual is perceived to be an asshole or insufficiently deferential to TSA, they are out of luck. 

This is not a security procedure unless there is an amazing model out that which proves all potential security threats are by definition visible and loud assholes.  We saw with the 9-11 hijackers that this is not the case; they attempted to blend in and not draw too much official attention to themselves.  We know how the KGB trained their NOCs to be normal and quiet but not too quiet individuals.

This is an absurd security policy. If it was a security policy, the workarounds available to cooperative passengers who forgot their ID would also be available to the non-cooperative individuals.   However it is a policy that asserts dominance.

BJ in a great post looking at Canadian stun gun usage also notes the same basic trend.  The use of force is increasing and the threshold of force utilization is decreasing:

But despite the new rules, the percentage of Taser incidents in which the weapon was fired multiple times crept up from 42 per cent in 2005 to 45 per cent in 2007.

The investigation also revealed that in 2,200 of the 3,000 RCMP Taser incidents between 2002 and 2007, the person the Mounties were dealing with was unarmed.[Emp Added]

It's clear that the Taser is being used more for pain compliance than for actual threats. 

Using a firearm is a very high cost action for a cop.  It is a life or death decision as cops are taught to aim for center of body mass which means the chest which means the aimpoint has a high probability of killing an individual.  However tasers, stun guns and pepper sprays have much lower costs of usage as they are probabilistically less likely to cause death or lasting injury.  This, unsurprisingly, means a much higher utilization of weapons in significantly less threatening situations.  It also lowers the cost of pain compliance and humiliation.

Ahh welcome to a world of fear and abuse of power enabled by fear.  Make sure your papers are in good order and the official is in a good mood....   

Does it Come With a Full-Auto Switch?

By BJ

You can bet some people aren't going to be too happy with these findings, even as they don't come as much of a surprise to me.

RCMP officers are likely to fire their electronic stun guns multiple times during an altercation, despite a policy that warns it may pose health risks, according to a joint investigation by CBC News/Radio Canada and the Canadian Press.

The media outlets, which analyzed the Taser-use forms RCMP officers are required to fill out if they draw a stun gun, also found multiple use of Tasers is increasing.

The data from 2002 to 2007 is heavily censored, but reveals that Mounties used their Tasers more than 3,000 times nationwide during the period. In more than 1,300 of those cases, officers fired their stun guns more than once.

The analysis also revealed that in nearly 18 per cent of the incidents, officers had fired three or more times.

. . .

The RCMP policy, in place since 2005, states that “multiple deployment or continuous cycling of the CEW [conducted energy weapon] may be hazardous to a subject. Unless situational factors dictate otherwise, do not cycle the CEW repeatedly, for more than 15-20 seconds at a time against a subject.”

. . .

But despite the new rules, the percentage of Taser incidents in which the weapon was fired multiple times crept up from 42 per cent in 2005 to 45 per cent in 2007.

The investigation also revealed that in 2,200 of the 3,000 RCMP Taser incidents between 2002 and 2007, the person the Mounties were dealing with was unarmed.[Emp Added]

It's clear that the Taser is being used more for pain compliance than for actual threats. A large part of that is due to the mistaken belief that they are next to harmless rather than potentially lethal. On the bright side, that last part may be changing:

A federal jury has held Taser International responsible for the death of a Salinas man in U.S. District Court in San Jose on Friday, and awarded his family more than $6 million in punitive and compensatory damages.

An attorney for the family called the verdict a “landmark decision,” and indicated that it was the first time Taser International had been held responsible for a death or injury linked to its product.

A few more cases like that, and police forces in North America may actually start paying real close attention to how their officers are using their toys.

Media morons inartfully dodge their malfeasance

By Libby

While I remain completely unimpressed by McLellan's mea culpa, I'm liking that our malingering media are being forced to account for their own failures to inform the public of the deceits leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Not that they're taking the scrutiny particularly seriously. The major culprits are laughing it off and adding insult to injury.

Politico reporter Mike Allen, formerly of The Washington Post and Time, appeared yesterday on the show of right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher. The two of them guffawed together at how absurd are Scott McCellan's claims that the media was "deferential" to the Bush administration and then Allen said this:

ALLEN: And indeed, Scott does adopt the vocabulary, rhetoric of the left wing haters. Can you believe it in here he says the White House press corps was too deferential to the administration?

This was exactly the narrative they were plying back then that allowed this disaster to occur. Anyone who dared question the White House lies was a left wing hater and besides it's not their job to question authority. They were of the mind that they deserved their bloated salaries for mere stenography. And it wasn't just in the runup to the invasion that they failed us. They continued their fluffing right through the 04 elections. One had to go to the foreign press to find a functioning media. Take for instance, the attack on Richard Clarke, who blew the whistle on Bush's long pre-planned invasion of Iraq.

The swiftness and ferocity of the Bush White House's attack on Richard Clarke tells you two things: his story may be largely true, and the Bush administration is terrified that the American people will believe it. [...]

The White House did not let a single news cycle go by before questioning that the alleged encounter between the president and Clarke had ever taken place, assigning dark motives to a man who has served four presidents, three of them Republicans.

And the self-serving US media stars, along with their pet neo-cons, jumped right in with their long knives to stab Clarke in the back. Small wonder so few thereafter showed any similiar courage, although the knowledge of the deceptions was widespread.

"The conversation absolutely took place. I was there, but you can't name me," the witness said. "I was one of several people present. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the president had Iraq on his mind, first and foremost." This former national security council official was too terrified to go on the record - he knows how vengeful this administration can be.

Former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill paid the price for truthtelling with his account of "how the Bush White House set its sights on Iraq from day one." Rumsfeld threatened him and when he failed to kowtow, he "instantly became the target of an investigation by his former department, which claimed that he had revealed state secrets."

Yet the facts were obvious and irrefutable. "The fact that the Pentagon pulled the fighting force most equipped for hunting down Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan in March 2002 in order to pre- position it for Iraq cannot be denied." After spending five months establishing rapport on the ground in Afghanistan, the elite unit was given two days notice to turn over their mission to those most ill-equipped to carry it out. But this was probably the most egregious failure.

Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

We had AQ in our sights. We could have taken out bin Laden, actually won the so-called on terror right there, but Bush had other priorites, long in the planning. Back then, few expected our media to become so complicit in the lie, but they not only allowed the Bush administration to proclaim "it was the only qualified protector of national security," they actively persecuted the truthtellers on the administration's behalf. The Guardian said then that, "Sooner or later - and certainly before November - that truth will out." But it didn't out, it was buried in reams of White House press releases dutifully transcribed by a craven press corps too enamored of their own place on the guest lists of the powerful to do their duty to their profession or the American people.

Yesterday, Scott McClellan ran into Richard Clarke and apologized for denouncing Clarke's book at the time. That's not enough by a mile. He should set up on a street corner and apologize to every family who lost a loved one in this occupation, to every soldier who came home broken and to every Iraqi who lost everything to the lies he perpetrated in service to his former masters.

But really, that's even not enough. Almost the entire corporate media not only failed to tell the truth, they actively worked to destroy anyone brave to do so on the public record. There's no apology, no penance great enough to undo the damage and destruction caused by the negligence of McLellan and all those of his ilk in the punditry who enthusiastically 'created the reality' the White House demanded. In a sane world they would have long ago been relieved of their microphones and banished from civil society.

Tainted by Torture

By Fester:

MSNBC is reporting that one of the military commission/tribunals has been cancelled against the alleged 20th hijacker as the entire trial and evidence chain has been tainted by torture:

The Pentagon has dropped charges against a Saudi at Guantanamo who was alleged to have been the so-called "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks, his U.S. military defense lawyer said Monday...

But in reviewing the case, the convening authority for military commissions, Susan Crawford, decided to dismiss the charges against al-Qahtani...

The attorney said he could not comment on the reasons for the dismissal until discussing the case with lawyers for the other five defendants. Officials previously said al-Qahtani had been subjected to a harsh interrogation authorized by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

This is what happens when we as a country lack the balls to follow our own rules and basic societal norms.  If the case against Qahtani was solid it could have been proven in the same damn way that the case against the original WTC bombers was proven --- meticulous work within a framework of law.  That worked and that increased the legitimacy and prestige of the United States because we acted with justice instead of vengeance.  We acted with restraint instead of fear. And that restraint strengthened us. 

This amazing lack of faith in American institutions still astounds be at times coming from such dime story patriots and nationalistic tinged messaging machines.  America 's restraint and faith in the rule of law is a strength and not a weakness.  Today torture is an embarrassment  whose stain can not be easily removed even as it lessens our credibility, legitimacy and moral orientation.  Grow some balls America, and believe in your principals again. 

Tasering the Elderly

By BJ

It's been a little over six month since Robert Dziekanski died after being repeatedly tasered by the RCMP at the Vancouver Airport. The inquiry into his death started on Monday, which appears to be none too soon, as the RCMP seem to have learned very little from the incident.

An elderly man in Kamloops, B.C., was zapped three times on the torso by a police stun gun while lying on his hospital bed, CBC News has learned.

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

"They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery," Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

You read that correctly. You had three RCMP officers, squaring off against an 82-year-old holding a small pocket knife, on oxygen, and lying on his back in a hospital bed, and apparently the only reasonable method of subduing him was multiple shots from their taser guns. Who the hell is training these guys?

The safety of tasers is an ongoing debate, but the real issue here isn't really if they are safe to use, but how they are being used. To quote myself:

The fact that tasers are "safe", meaning that they don't normally kill the people you shoot with them, is entirely beside the point. Its their use when they need not be used that's the point. We give these guys guns and authorize them to shoot people when its justified. We'd make quite a bit of noise if the police starting shooting people when it wasn't necessary. We shouldn't be any less angry over excessive use of force in any other instances.

After the release of the video showing what happened to Dziekanski, Boris at The Galloping Beaver posted some thoughts on how policing had changed over the years from his father's day.

My father was a policeman during the 1960s and would often go out on patrol without his service revolver. Never once did he have to draw his weapon or beat someone to make an arrest. Indeed, he once, unarmed and alone, successfully disarmed and arrested a man with a shotgun who’d just blown a hole in his wife’s leg. He did this with a calm voice and discussion.

Somewhere between his day, and now, there seems to have been something lost in the human side of policing.

I wonder if the invention and provision of the Tazer has created the incentive and standard procedural justification – an “immediate action” - to use it, when in the past a politiely worded request, a soothing voice, would’ve sufficed. I wonder if violent arrest technique has become increasingly official procedure, regardless of context, among some police forces.[Emp. mine]

From the recent incident above, or this one, or this one, it seems to be the case that police in North America have moved more towards forceful submission rather than conflict resolution. This is a bad move on the whole.

What the police appear to miss is that not everyone cowers when confronted with power and threats. Some people push back. Even innocent, unarmed ones. Granted, the police should be able to protect themselves, but not at the expense of the public. Ultimately, this harms the police as public trust is eroded, and the public begins to fear the people meant to protect them. Policing then becomes a version of a protection racket.

Ultimately, such tactics undermine law enforcement's legitimacy, which can have dire effects for everyone's security. Unfortunately, I don't see the trend reversing itself anytime soon.

A win for policy in politics

By Fester:

One of the most heartening results of the Obama blow-out in North Carolina and the Clinton nail-biting popular vote win but delegate wash in Indiana is the impact of the gasoline tax holiday proposal.  If you listen to the Obama campaign, they are claiming that their opposition to the holiday gave late breaking undecided voters a hook to vote for Obama.  I don't have their numbers to back this assertion up but given that he did better than most of the immediate pre-election polls, this is a plausible interpretation. 

More importantly, the holiday proposal was not the political winner that the Clinton campaign thought it was.  It did not move votes for her.  This proposal was aimed at her bloc of late breakers and low information voters and it did not work.

We had a clear and sharp divide between good sounding but completely ineffective policy proposals and good policy.  We have been conditioned to believe that good sounding policies trump good policies but it is very heartening to see the opposite here.  Good policy was at least able to break even with good sounding policy last night.  As a wonk, that warms the cockles of my heart. 

A Historic First

By BJ

I had meant to get to this earlier, because it bears repeating. [Via]

A Canadian captured in Afghanistan at age 15 can be tried for murder in the Guantanamo war crimes court, a U.S. military judge ruled in rejecting claims that he was a child soldier who should be rehabilitated rather than prosecuted.

Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr, now 21, is charged in the Guantanamo court with throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier during a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.

The Kadr case was already shown to be a mockery of due process back in February when the military accidently released documents showing Kadr wasn't the only person alive when US soldiers entered the compound, but this ruling is more historic in it's own way.

His military lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, had argued in February hearings at the Guantanamo naval base that Khadr was a child soldier illegally conscripted by his father, an al Qaeda financier. He urged the judge to drop the charges, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, issued a ruling on Wednesday agreeing with prosecutors' position that the law authorizing the Guantanamo trials contained no minimum age.

Brownback's ruling clears the way for Khadr to be tried in the special tribunals created by the Bush administration to try non-U.S. captives it considers "unlawful enemy combatants" outside the regular civilian and military courts.

Kuebler called the ruling "an embarrassment to the United States" and said Canada would share in the embarrassment if it allows its citizen to be tried at Guantanamo. He said Khadr would be the first child soldier tried for war crimes in modern history.

Canada, of course, won't be doing anything about Kadr so long as we're led by folks who worship Bush and the neocons, something which embarrasses a great number of us all on it's own. This will add a considerable stain.

Aren't we all proud to live in countries willing to allow this historic first?

On Being Spineless

Sam Harris has an essay over at The Huffington Post about how we in the West have turned into a bunch of cowardly, spineless jellyfish because we don’t offer more and greater platforms to those who attack Islam, generally don't go out of our way to attack Islam ourselves, and even occasionally go to the great lengths of actually criticizing people who do attack Islam.

I’ll leave aside the debate over whether or not it’s truly necessary to distribute and promote material you disagree with in order to defend “Free Speech”, but Harris does offer a comparison in his essay that to me encapsulates the reason I dislike so much of what he talks about in the rest of it.

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. [emp. added]

The problem with his little comparison is that he's comparing a tree to a leaf. He isn't comparing Mormonism to Islam, but taking the FLDS, "depraved cult" and comparing it to Islam “in the aggregate”, so that he can say that all Muslims are worse than the most extremist Mormons.

The difference is stark and shows the double-standard that Harris and others like him hold for Muslims. No one ever asks that every Mormon of every stripe publicly condemn and reject and disavow the FLDS sect. The FLDS are portrayed as a “depraved cult”, and the mere fact that other Mormons aren’t members of said cult is generally enough for most everyone to give them a pass. Just for a moment, do a quick bit of research and see how far off the FLDS sect is from “traditional” Mormonism in many of those abhorrent practices.

Polygamy is certainly still a tenet with some strength in the more “mainstream” Mormon flock, enough for HBO to do a comedy series on it. How much discussion is there over how close other Mormons may be in their beliefs to those in the compound? Why not a discussion about Mormons “in the aggregate”? How about some calls for a Mormon "Reformation"?

When the FLDS branch, or abortion clinic bombers, or some other deranged Christians do something nasty, regardless whether or not they can find all sorts of justifications for their acts in their holy books, they are treated as deranged individuals or groups, rather than as representative of their faith. Muslims aren’t so lucky.

Whenever a Muslim does something, even if they don’t use any religious justification for their actions, it is treated as an example of the entire faith and everybody who follows it. Occasionally it is more subtle, but it is the difference between saying someone of religion X did some nasty thing, and saying someone did some nasty thing because of religion X. Muslims always seem to fall into the latter category.

Go back, if you really want to, to all those stories about the FLDS compound, and wonder for a moment if the media didn’t bother using the acronym, but instead always referred to the group solely as Mormons, or at most, fundamentalist Mormons? Talked about how their Mormon beliefs justified such practices? How “traditional” Mormon belief allowed such things? How everything they did was because they were Mormons?

How long do you think it would be before the rest of the Mormon community got a little upset over the coverage?

No faith, no group, does terribly well if it gets painted as though its most extreme members are representative of the whole. Hell, as an atheist I don’t like being lumped in with guys like Harris or a cretin like Chris Hitchens, even if by definition I happen to share at least some of their views to varying degrees. They don’t answer to me and their views are their own.

The Mormons at the compound in Texas are responsible for their own acts, regardless of what the Mormon community as a whole believes or supports, and the same goes for any other people belonging to any other overall grouping.

Harris, though, doesn’t see it that way. The only people he seems willing to criticize as individuals are those who don’t feel it’s right to demonize an entire faith because some of those who purportedly follow it are really, really bad, (particularly Muslims who seem oddly unwilling to demonize their own faith).

The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it

Islam. Not Islamists, not jihadists, not Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, not particular practices or certain activities, no qualifiers or quibbling. Go out and bash Islam, plain and simple.

But really, as Harris tells us, he’s not the bigot here.

if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse.

Note to Harris: Denouncing the entire Islamic faith is not a form of responsible civil discourse. When you figure that out, I’m sure you’ll find that there are plenty of Arabs and Muslims capable and willing to partake in such discussions.

Cross-posted from Northman's Fury

The Truthiness of Experts

By Fester:

I usually don't/can't stay up to watch the Colbert Report as I start to get grumpy at work if I don't get enough sleep these days.  However I will make an exception tonight as I see the Hillary Clinton truthiness tour continue with her endorsement of the Colbert gut call methodology of policy analysis.

Could she name a single economist who agrees with her support for the gas tax holiday?

Hillary sidestepped the question, and tried to use the complete dearth of expert support for the idea to her advantage, pointing to it as proof that she's on the side of ordinary folks against "elite opinion" -- a phrase she used twice.

"I think we've been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion behind policies that haven't worked well for hard working Americans," she said.

A bit later she added: "It's really odd to me that arguing to give relief to a vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback...Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that don't benefit" the vast majority of the American people.

An ordinary voter begged to differ, however. Stephanopoulos turned the mike over to a woman who said she supported Obama and said she makes less than $25,000 a year.

Besides there being a vast social and influence chasm between political/media elites and actual experts, this is a truthiness moment.  The gas tax holiday is a good policy because it feels good (or at least polls that way) while those biased facts and empirical elasticity models don't feel good. 

This is an interesting piece of trying to frame Obama as part of the bad decision making of the past seven years.  I think it will be unsuccessful as Obama just has to call "Iraq War vote" and leave it at that as the counterweight to Clinton's frame as fighter for the 'common-sense' underdog. 

Ohhh--- silly season, when will it be over

Gas tax holidays and government delegitimatization

By Fester:

The proposed gas tax holiday is a dumb and counterproductive policy and political idea.  It will lead to significant windfall transfers to producers while creating minimal new supplies and minimal decreases in counter-factual prices.  It is a cheap gimmick that masks that lack of relevant policy option space.  I expect that from the McCain campaign as Republicans have an ideological opposition to the notion that government can envision, plan, create and run successful policy programs that are not related to who is sleeping with whom.  However the short term pig-piling on by Senator Clinton is damaging to the Democratic brand and belief that government can and should be able to have a positive impact on society and daily life by successful program and policy implementation.

Professor Pollkatz notes that the price of gas is an excellent inverse predictor of Bush's popularity and he offers an intriguing hypothesis to explain this correlation:

The connection between gas prices and presidential approval is not (simply) that Bush is connected to Big Oil.  It's that the price of gasoline is just about the only Federal policy result non-wonks see and can relate to on a day-to-day basis.  Tax cuts?  Most people don't even know how much tax they pay.  War and defense?  Affects foreigners and National Guard families, not the rest of us.  But gasoline price displays, changing daily, hit people directly where they live.  And they blame Bush.

Everything else in government is too damn big or too damn disguised to be reflective of the federal government's ability to be an effective provider of public goods.  We saw this with the disconnect between people with Medicare who strongly like Medicare as it is currently constituted, and an ideological disposition against any expansion of a Medicare like program as 'big government intrusion.  Milton Friedman regrets working on the withholding of income taxes as people just accept the deductions and look at their take home pay. 

The most optimistic quick estimate of the impact of the proposed gas tax holiday is consumers would see a nine cent reduction, all else being held equal, for three months.  This estimate is being made by Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser:

Assume both supply and demand are equally price inelastic, and this means the incidence of the Federal tax is about 50-50. Eliminating the gasoline tax for a short duration gives a windfall to both consumers and producers, of about equal proportion. (By the way, this conclusion is not true of state gasoline taxes; see Chouinard and Perloff (2004)).

Paul Krugman is arguing that consumers will see, all else being equal, minimal to no changes in counter factual prices due to the very short run supply elasticities. 

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that.

The reasonably most optimistic argument is for a nine cent per gallon reduction in prices due to the policy change while a pessimistic take is projecting minimal to no reduction in prices due to the policy change compared to what they otherwise would have been.  At $3.60 a gallon for regular unleaded, this is a decrease in price of between 0% and 2.6%.  I currently get a better per gallon discount on my grocery store loyalty card reward program.   

And gas prices will not be at $3.60 per gallon.  Instead the combination of continual instability in oil producing regions, and typical seasonal increases in demand will continue to drive prices up as there is no slack in the supply chain.  If the tax holiday is introduced, people will see little to no real impact; at most they would see a slightly slower increase in the price of gas than they otherwise would have seen.

This would be a political victory for McCain as he can claim that he 'did something!' At the same time it is an ideological victory as it can be construed as yet another demonstration that the federal government is inherently ineffective and should not be in the business of devising policies.   And that works fine for a Republican.  However the same implicit comparison would be drawn for the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, and it is here I have a problem with the construction of political arbitrage.  Mild, transient and expedient personal political gain is privatized while the costs of reducing the value of the Democratic brand and a core belief are borne by the entire party. 

Really --- it's the media's fault

By Fester

The recent poll that showed 90% of the United States adults believing that the economy is either 'poor' or 'not so good' is a little bit higher than I expected but in the general ball park.  However it is being dismissed by a blogger whose analysis I normally respect as mere blather:

While I think that there’s plenty of room for concern, I think the idea that the economy is in poor shape is poppycock. As Will Rogers said, they don’t know nothin’ but what they read in the newspaper.

Let's see what we can blame the media for?  We can blame it for laziness, we can blame it for inanity, and we can blame it for not being able to find and pursue their comparative advantages most effectively.  However we can not blame it for the following items that may have a significant impact on how people perceive their economic circumstances.

The fixed costs of living or at least the least variable demand ideas are increasing rapidly in price.  As I was driving this morning, regular unleaded at one gas station near my house was $3.42/gallon and the other station was at $3.49 a gallon.  Both record nominal highs, and a significant increase from last year.  Diesel was at $4.30 a gallon.  And we have not even come close to the summer driving season.  Food prices have been increasing dramatically.  This graph from Barry at the Big Picture shows that transportation and food prices, which are relatively inelastic in the short run are increasing above the seasonally adjusted rates.  Medical expenditures are also rapidly increasing.

The seasonal adjustments intentionally understate 1st quarter price changes so people have seen high price increases that they typically expect and also unexpected increases in food and fuel. 

This would be tolerable if cash compensation was increasing at or above the actual costs of living, but that is not the case.  Right now the U-6 measure for unemployment is on the upswing and this measures economy wide underemployment and unemployment, hours worked have dropped and real wages have been flat or declining again. Finally median family real income has declined over this economic cycle.  That has never happened post-war until now.   

So consumers are under pressure from both ends.  Higher fixed costs and lower incomes through either increased unemployment, fewer hours worked, or flat wages.  Now this would not be so bad if people could access their reserves, but there is a problem here, and the problem is not the media. 

Over the previous economic cycle, Americans as a whole had negative savings rates.  During the boom times we were borrowing to keep up with the expectation that trend GDP growth would soon produce trend wage and income growth as well as trend workforce participation rates.  That did not happen; most wage gains were eaten up by higher health care costs. Consumption smoothing was based on a false hope of future growth.  The cycle was a fizzle for most people. 

The big area of reserve accumulation for most Americans was in the real or nominal value of their homes.  Great increases in nominal equity gave at least the illusion of people having a sufficient cushion available for hard times as HELOCs could be opened and maintained with a zero draw down until an emergency hit. With the housing bubble bursting and the credit market freeze-up, these reserves have dissipated.  Either the equity that was believed to be there is no longer there as homes are re-marked to a newer and much lower price, OR the lenders are shutting down the equity lines.   

So going into a highly probable recession American consumers are faced with higher short term fixed costs, high debt loads, few reserves and comparatively weak income performance during the 'boom' years.  As long as the system is stable and running in a single direction of higher nominal home values, the system at least  seemed to work.  Any shock, anticipated or not, and the wobbling overwhelms personal stabilizers.  A baby's breath is sufficient to knock people off of their personal financial stability while in previous cycles a strong gale was needed to accomplish the same dislocation. 

And that is not the media's fault.