Coyote Blog

Matt Welch no the fact-checking genre:

But the real problem with such lists isn’t the lack of partisan diversity; it’s the glaring lack of lies told to the public in the service of wielding government force. Only one of PolitiFact’s Top 10—Obama blaming 90 percent of the 2009−12 deficit increase on George W. Bush—involved an official lying about his own record. The rest all focused on the way that politicians (and their surrogates) characterized their competitors’ actions and words. This isn’t a check on the exercise of power; it’s a check on the exercise of rhetoric.

And when it comes to rhetoric that motivates journalists into action, nothing beats culturally divisive figures from the opposing political tribe. So it was that in May 2011, the respected Nieman Journalism Lab set the mediasphere abuzz with an academic study of more than 700 news articles and 20 network news segments from 2009 that addressed a single controversial claim from the ObamaCare debate. Was it the president’s oft-repeated whopper that he was nobly pushing the reform rock up the hill despite the concentrated efforts of health care “special interests”? Was it his promise that “if you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan,” something that has turned out not to be true? Was it the way Obama and the Democrats brazenly gamed and misrepresented the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the bill, claiming it wouldn’t add “one dime” to the deficit?

No. The cause for reconsideration of the ObamaCare coverage was not the truth-busting claims made by a sitting president in the service of radically reshaping an important aspect of American life but rather the Facebook commentary of a former governor, Sarah Palin.

Here is the issue with media bias:  It is not that journalists sit in some secret room and craft plans to overthrow their ideological opposition, Journolist notwithstanding.  It is that a monoculture limits the range of issues to which the media applies skepticism.  I am as guilty as anyone.  Hypotheses and pronouncements that do not fit with my view of how the world works are met with much more skepticism, checking of sources, etc.    The media is generally comfortable with a large and expansive role for government and seldom fact-checks the arguments for its expansion.

In fact, as I have written before, the media has an odd way of covering itself against charges of being insufficient skeptical about new legislation:  They raise potential issues with it, but only after it passes.

Perhaps I do not give Sarah Palin enough credit, because this is a really good passage, from one of her recent speeches (emphasis added by Mickey Kaus)

We sent a new class of leaders to D.C., but immediately the permanent political class tried to co-opt them – because the reality is we are governed by a permanent political class, until we change that. They talk endlessly about cutting government spending, and yet they keep spending more. They talk about massive unsustainable debt, and yet they keep incurring more. They spend, they print, they borrow, they spend more, and then they stick us with the bill. Then they pat their own backs, and they claim that they faced and “solved” the debt crisis that they got us in, but when we were humiliated in front of the world with our country’s first credit downgrade, they promptly went on vacation.

No, they don’t feel the same urgency that we do. But why should they? For them business is good; business is very good.  Seven of the ten wealthiest counties are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Polls there actually – and usually I say polls, eh, they’re for strippers and cross country skiers – but polls in those parts show that some people there believe that the economy has actually improved. See, there may not be a recession in Georgetown, but there is in the rest of America.

Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars.  They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

So, do you want to know why the permanent political class doesn’t really want to cut any spending? Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed – a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.

Lefties are struggling with the concept of a libertarian doing a good deed (in this case, Radley Balko's great journalism leading to the release of Cory Maye.

Here is the real problem for the Left:  This is exactly the kind of story -- a black man  railroaded into jail in Mississippi -- that leftish reporters used to pursue, before they shifted their attention to sorting through Sarah Palin's emails.  A lot of investigative journalism has gone by the wayside -- in Phoenix, it has really been left to independent Phoenix New Times to do real investigative journalism on folks like Joe Arpiao, as our main paper the Arizona Republic has largely fled the field.

It's hard to see populist, wacky GOP candidates making much progress nationally if they can't get any traction in Arizona.

A poll of 623 Arizona voters released today reflects a couple things -- almost nobody likes Donald Trump, and most people would prefer Sarah Palin not move here.In the poll -- from Public Policy Polling -- opinions are recorded about possible GOP nominees for the 2012 presidential election, and how they'd vote if they ran against President Barack Obama.

Donald Trump was the most unfavorable of five possible GOP candidates -- with a full 2/3 of people dissin' the Donald with an "unfavorable" ranking.

Remember that whole thing about former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin moving to Arizona for a possible Senate campaign?

Most people would prefer that not happen.

Palin was the second-most-disliked candidate -- with 62 percent having unfavorable opinions -- and a later question revealed 57 percent of people would prefer that she not move to Arizona.

Trump also suffered the biggest blowout in a hypothetical match-up against Obama, garnering votes from only 36 percent of respondents.

I have written a ton in the past on what I consider the fundamental problem in health care:  The taking of price-value tradeoffs out of the hands of consumers, first through encouragement of first-dollar employer plans and now through a Federal government takeover.  For example:

The computer keyboard I am typing on right now costs about $55 on Amazon.com.  Is that a fair price?

At some level, the answer must be “yes.”  Why?  Because I bought it – simple as that.  No one was compelling me to buy this particular model, so if I thought the price too high or the features too skimpy, I would have just passed on the purchase.  If I desperately wanted or needed a keyboard, I might have bought one of literally hundreds of others for sale at Amazon, priced from a low of $1.49 (used) to a high of $2400 (I kid you not).  After shopping through the various options, I chose my keyboard as the best match, for me, of price and features.

For decades, this seemingly prosaic act of individual “shopping” has been steadily eroded in health care with the growth of third party payers, particularly Medicare.   How much did you pay for you last doctor visit?  Your last x-ray?  Your last blood test?  Believe it or not, it is still possible to price-shop medical care — I do it myself, because I have a high deductible health insurance plan under which I pay all but the most bankrupting bills out of pocket.  As an example, three x-rays last month of my son’s ankle would have been billed to my insurance company at over $100, but I asked for their cash price and they pulled a separate book from a hidden place under the counter and quoted me $35.  I got a 70+% discount merely for caring about the price.

But my health plan, which includes this seemingly positive incentive to shop, will soon be illegal as high-deductible insurance plans, as well as medical savings accounts, are effectively banned.  Under Obamacare, virtually all individual payments for medical products and services will cease — the government and a few large, highly regulated insurers will pay for nearly every visit, drug, or procedure.  The government will be making price-value trade-offs for our care, and they will be doing it incredibly imperfectly, because by eliminating individual shopping they have cut off a, excuse the pun, priceless source of information.

And here:

If we are all forced to have the same, low deductible, first-dollar health plans, what incentive is one going to have to stay out of the health care system, even for something minor?  What is to stop you from going to the doctor every day because you are hypochondriacal, or you are lonely, or bored, or just because you want to save on buying your own subscription to Highlights Magazine?  The buffet will be open and everything will be essentially free – what’s to stop people from gorging themselves?

You might say that you are more responsible than that, and perhaps you are.  But think about this:  Twenty years ago we used to all complain about the 2 or 3 pieces of junk mail we might find a day in our mailbox.  That was when the each piece of mail cost real money to send.  Today, junk mail in the form of email is essentially free to send.  How many pieces of junk mail do you get today?  Even if you are not hitting the system up for free health care, you know someone else will be spamming the system, and eventually all of us as taxpayers will have to pay for it.

The only way to stop this behavior is for the government to create a department of “No” to head off this behavior — what Sarah Palin so famously called “Death Panels.”

Both Tyler Cowen and Megan McArdle discuss individual vs. the government in making price-value tradeoffs for health care in the context of Paul Ryan's proposal to voucherize Medicare.

McArdle:

Expect there to be a lot of angry back and forth over this in the next week or so.  But one thing to keep in mind is that this Medicare plan is not effectively very different from what the Democrats claim ObamaCare is going to do:  which is to say, cap the amount of money spent on providing health benefits to those who are not rich enough to opt out of the public system.  The Democrats want to do so by having a central committee of experts decide what our health dollars get spent on; the GOP wants to put those decisions into the hands of consumers.  But this is not an argument about who loves old, sick people more.  Both parties are promising to halt the rapid growth of government health care expenditures, which is definitionally going to fall hardest on old, sick people....

There are also the tradeoffs to consider.  It seems quite likely to me that vouchers are going to be better at controlling health care cost growth than a central committee.  Every committee decision that cuts off a potentially useful treatment (and I'm afraid it can't all be back surgery and hormone replacement therapy) will trigger a lobbying explosion from affected groups.  Each treatment is a decision with a small marginal cost to the taxpayer; it's in aggregate that they become expensive.  Which means that the congressional tendency is always going to be to override--and while there are supposed to be structural barriers against this in the bill, they aren't very strong . . . about like trying to quit smoking by hiding your cigarettes from yourself.

I was doing something today that I generally avoid, which is thinking about Sarah Palin.  How bizarre would it be to wake up one morning and find that some random maniac you had never met in a city you might never have visited had gone on a killing spree and prominent people were all over the media blaming you for the killing. Not your political party, not all those who shared your views, not all those from a similar group, but you personally. Blood on your hands.   How weird would that be  (and how pissed off would I be -- I can say that I would have lashed out publicly early and hard and often, much harder than Palin's video, though no one ever has called me "presidential" in temperament).

Seems like there should be a novel in there somewhere.  Yeah, I know the falsely accused thing is done all the time (e.g. the Prisoner) but I can't shake the feeling there is an interesting concept here.

If you had told me last week that half the media would be blaming Sarah Palin for the actions of a leftish nutcase, or that Keith Olberman would be accusing, well, anybody, of being too immoderate in their rhetoric, I would have said you were crazy.  Seldom have I found the tone and tenor of the media coverage of any event to be less satisfactory than with the Giffords shooting this weekend.  So of course, I have joined the fray with my own column on Forbes.

We libertarians cringe when presented with a “national tragedy” like the shooting of Gabriella Giffords.  Not because we are somehow more or less sensitive to vilence and loss of life, but because we begin bracing for the immediate, badly thought-out expansion of state power that nearly always follows any such tragedy, whether it be 9/11 or Columbine or Oklahoma City or even Pearl Harbor.  Those looking to expand the power of the state, and of state officials, make their greatest progress in the emotional aftermath of a such a tragedy.  These tragedies are the political equivilent of the power play in ice hockey, when defenders of liberty find themselves temporarily shorthanded, and those wishing to expand state power rush to take advantage.

Here is one example from later in the piece:

After 9/11, Republicans argued that it was time to put away political differences to rally around the President in a time of war.  They implied that criticizing the President in such a time was somehow unpatriotic and counter-productive.   Was this true?  I thought the opposite — that the momentous decisions to be made post-9/11 demanded more rather than less debate.  America would eventually wake up from this celebration of unity with a hangover in the form of the TSA, the Patriot Act, detention at Guantanamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fact is that politicians, particularly those in power, find every excuse to ask Americans to “moderate their public discourse,” in large part because this request translates in the real world to “reduce the criticisms of those in power.”    So it should not be surprising that many of those who represent our current ruling party blamed the Giffords shooting on the hate-filled rhetoric of the opposition party, even before we knew the name of the killer,.

From a larger historical perspective, I would argue that current political discourse is really rather tame.   Even the wackiest cable opinion show pales in comparison to the fire-breathing political attacks that could be found in nearly any 19th century newspaper.  In the 1960’s, political discourse became so heated that it spilled out into the streets in the form of urban riots.  In fact, what we should fear far more than our rhetoric is the current threats by politicians like Jim Clyburn of South Carolina to use this tragedy as an excuse to put new restrictions on speech.  A number of high-profile comentators have spent more time blaming this shooting on Sarah Palin than on the shooter himself.   Given the complete lack of evidence for any such connection, such efforts can only be viewed as an effort by those on power to silence a prominent opposition leader.

As y'all know, I am not a member of either the Coke or Pepsi party, so I find all the partisan mudslinging on the political blogs to be just kind of funny.  Particularly when both sides are piously accusing the other of exactly the same behavior, while maintaining that they are immune from said behavior  (or only engaging in it because the other guy started it).

I really don't understand political strategy.  I admit this.  Take global warming.  I really thought the CRU email thing was a minor distraction.  After all, the there were so many fundamental flaws in the science and scientific process that a lot of the CRU stuff was old news to those who have paid attention.  But I was wrong.  There was something about the scandal that was more compact and easy to tell, it fit into a box or storyline familiar to both the media that had to report it and the public that had to consume it.  I understood the whole scandal and its impact so poorly that I have done little blogging at my climate site lately, as I still can't get excited blogging about commissions and investigations into the scandal that seem to obsess the skeptic community currently.

So I won't say that this strategy by Kevin Drum is wrong, I will just say I don't understand it:

On Twitter, here was my insta-reaction to Obama's oil spill address from the Oval Office:

What a terrible speech.

Unfair? Maybe! I mean, compared to Sarah Palin's (literally) incomprehensible burbling on Bill O'Reilly's show afterward it was a model of straight talk and reassurance. But that's a pretty low bar.

What's the deal with Sarah Palin?  I swear she gets more pub from her enemies than her supporters.  How does it somehow help a sitting President -- who was supposedly elected because he was the most competent person of all time -- to be compared, however favorably, to a woman with limited political experience who holds no office?  Granted the Republicans really have no one of distinction leading them right now, and Palin is about the only Republican in years with any modicum of charisma.  But since when have losing VP candidates been the standard against which Presidents are measured?

I generally don't do horserace style political blogging on strategy between the Coke and Pepsi parties, and I am not going to start now.   However, I did find it funny that it was Mike Huckabee threatening Sarah Palin that she should not leave the GOP.  It's funny to me because of all the things the GOP could do to potentially attract me to the party, having Mike Huckabee leave the party would be close to first on the list.

The other day, there was an intriguing story in the USA Today that a disproportionate share of stimulus money is flowing to counties that voted for Obama.  In fact, counties that voted Obama are getting twice as much per capita so far as counties that did not.  Matt Yglesias writes:

The insinuation of the piece is that the stimulus bill's funding streams are being artfully manipulated or something to disproportionately direct resources toward Obama-loving constituencies....[But] the secret to the riddle seems to be that areas that benefit from federal spending formulae tend to support the Democrats. Not as a result of short-term fluctuations in voting patterns or federal spending levels, but as a structural element of American politics.

Kevin Drum misses Matt's point, I think, when he responds:

Actually, that's not quite right.  It's weirder than that.  I just got around to reading the piece, and aside from the factual statement in the lead, it doesn't insinuate that the money is being unfairly distributed.  In fact, every single paragraph after the lead quotes people saying that there's nothing dubious going on and the money is just being distributed by formula.  The piece doesn't quote a single person, not even Sarah Palin, suggesting that there's any monkey business going on here.

But this does not refute Matt's point as I understand it, that "tinkering" is not necessary because the formulas themselves have been worked over time to preferentially send money certain places.  I would use the analogy that there are well worn channels where the money preferentially flows.

I must disagree that a story that money tends to flow preferentially (on a ratio as high as 2:1) to Democratic districts should be spiked, as Kevin Drum advocates. I think there is a story in this, though certainly I agree with Kevin it is not the story the author set out to write (one of micro-manipulation by Administration employees).

My sense is that the causality involved would be impossible to discover. Does money flow preferentially to these districts because Democrats are better or more focused on bringing home the taxpayer largess to their districts? Or does our money preferentially flow to these districts based on, say, economic or demographic factors that line up well with Democratic constituencies. Or is it, more likely in my mind, a virtuous circle with both factors involved.

Either way, this is an interesting story and some interesting new data in our endless red state-blue state analyses.

Far be it for me to interpret actions by politicians cynically.  There is a lot of analysis about why Sarah Palin resigned.  I don't know anything more than most, but here is what I told a friend way back in December:

Sarah Palin should resign now and go on the speaking / pundit circuit.  She is currently in the midst of her 15 minutes of fame and before it passes, she should jump on the opportunity.  In particular, there are all kinds of conservative business execs who will fork out $75,000 a pop to have Palin speak at corporate functions, sales conferences, etc.  This is not even to mention however much Fox is willing to pay her to be a talking head.

Sometimes I snap at someone for their criticism of a particular politician.  Typically, they assume I am doing so because I support that politician.  But in reality, I am using just sick of the implication that somehow other politicians would have been much better.  I absolutely agree with Don Boudreaux's comment:

Fareed Zakaria (author of a truly fine book and columnist for the
Washington Post) rightly argues that Sarah Palin is unqualified to be
president of the United States (and, hence, by extension, unqualified
to be V-P). Mr. Zakaria is correct that Gov. Palin's recent answer to a
question about the economy "is nonsense - a vapid emptying out of every
catchphrase about economics that came into her head." He's correct also
that she's unfit to be entrusted with the power of the modern
presidency.

But Mr. Zakaria is incorrect to suppose that these traits separate
Gov. Palin from other candidates for high political office. Calls by
Senators McCain and Obama for cracking down on "speculators" are full
of classic and wrongheaded catchphrases, as is Sen. Obama's vocal
skepticism about free trade. Gov. Palin is merely less skilled in
passing off inanities and claptrap as profundities.

"I think it was exciting to some that she was a woman"

- Bill Clinton on Sarah Palin  (via)