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Here’s something I didn’t post about last week because CT was so intermittent that I just didn’t get around to it. Megan McArdle responded to my critiques of her. Well, responded might be too strong. Reacted. She spends so much time speculating deeply about my apparently quite shallow motives that she doesn’t really get around to considering my argument....
If you massively publicly funded r&d, the results would be as good as massive private funding. Dollar for dollar, all you need is money. The US health care system is not better for r&d because it is a better signaling system for efficient r&d than are the systems of other countries. US r&d is just better funded. So there is no deep structural problem with health care reform that might cut private incentive to invest in r&d because there is no hard problem with how you could make up such an investment shortfall, should it arise. So there is no utterly vital structural reason to address that shortfall at the stage we are at.
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Speaking for myself, it was simple to conclude that the Bush junta was lying about something. First, I listened. I listened to the words and how they were strung together. I listened to who was talking and what was being said.... Second, I thought over what I'd heard. This is a crucial step in the process of forming an opinion, often overlooked. I mulled over not just what was said but what wasn't.... Then, because I had the luxury of distance, time and no pressure, I did some further mullin', ponderin' and considerin'. It further helped that after 9/11, I didn't piss my pants, develop a pathological fear of olive skin or take a paycheck from a conservative source, so I was free to surmise without ideological interference or goosebumps. I listeneded and I thinked. Then I decided the Bush people were lying. Funny: during that entire presidency, this process never failed me.
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It wasn't because people hated Bush that they didn't trust him on the War. It was because of the War and his lies that they began to hate him. As Krugman says, by the time the terror alert controversy boiled over there was ample reason to think of this crew as a pack of liars who did everything for their own personal political gain, including taking the country into war. It wasn't irrational to distrust them. It was plain nuts not to. But the real "gut-haters," the people who took an irrational dislike to a politician and reacted to everything he said and did as if he was a worse liar than Richard Nixon were the members of the Washington Press Corps who decided back in 1999 that Al Gore was not to be allowed to become President. And one tactic in their war on Gore was to treat George W. Bush as something the man clearly wasn't---deserving of the Presidency...
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And he said, "Sammy, I wish I felt a little better. I would like to go back to old"-and I won't call the name of the State; it wasn't Louisiana and it wasn't Texas--"I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old State, they haven't heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is...
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Ron Reagan Jr. and Joan Walsh on Hardball reminding Chris Matthews that reality seems to have a liberal bias. As they both point out, once again, the Villagers were wrong, and the "loony left," as the media likes to dismiss any of us as, were right. I disagree with both of them on one point, though. There is nothing "honorable" about what Tom Ridge is doing. He didn't quit and speak up when he was first asked to do this. And now that he's got a book to sell, suddenly he's feeding the public some half truths about what went on to gin up some interest in it. Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler have had a bit of an interesting exchange with The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder over his reaction to Ridge's latest revelation that are well worth the read on the topic of how the Villagers treat the left.
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This is a real life story, so it doesn't exactly have a point, or a moral, or even a conclusion except to say that the most striking thing of all about Klein's attitude towards me and presumably to his other readers was his assumption that although he's famous, and important, and people read his work that we read it as though it were a continually scrolling chyron at the bottom of a busy news screen and that we have no memory of what he has said, or done, or stood for. He was talking to a reader who actually reads him but he thought he could get away with bluffing me on a history which I actually share with him. He thought he could tell me that his argument with Glenn was something other than it was and that I couldn't go back, for myself, and review the evidence. Klein's Klein-line is that the parts of his past where he shilled for the Iraq war, where he covered for the excesses and abuses of the Bush Administration, where he played Hugh Hewitt's favorite “I ustabee a liberal but thes
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The post below is not only pointless, it is long. I will try a brief summary. Posner accused Romer of intellectual dishonestly, because he was sure that a speach she gave on the effect so far of the stimulus was " "responsible academic analysis." He knows that Romer has worked in the field and is a top notch academic economist (Posner has been cited a lot and, perhaps coincidentally, judges intellectuals by their citation count so he must know that Romer has been cited a lot too). I think he has an idea of what top notch academic economists are like based the ones he knows at the economics department and business school of the University of Chicago. There is indeed a huge contrast between *their* academic work and Romer's speach. However, there is no contrast at all between Romer's academic work and her speach. The speach is clearly, among other things,
