With threats of peace on the horizon, Brit Hume raises the alarm

Don't know about you, but whenever I see Brit Hume talk about war three little words run through my head. Vice Presidential Material.

I mean, he's got the gravitas of Cheney, the telegenic magic of Fred Thompson, and the bug eyed bellicosity Phil Gramm. Plus all kinds of other great old white dude qualities. Just look how certain he is! And unwavering! Why, with a man like that near the helm, scylla and charybdis wouldn't know what hit 'em!

it's too much heat/let's go to beach/and meet some cheeeick

It's satisfying to know that, no matter where I go in Austin this SXSW week, I will stumble upon great free music and, if I play my cards right, free beer and BBQ.

No matter where I go on the radio dial, too, I'll get live coverage of SXSW music performances. Most of the main radio stations in town are doing this, including the NPR station, KUT.

Tonight I discovered K'Naan, Somali-born hip-hop artist who claims that American hip-hop, despite it's merits, lacks street cred as L.A. streets cannot compare to Mogadishu streets. And the guy learned English listening to American hip-hop.Take a listen to a live set from SXSW.

The NPR site also has the Decemberists performing their new album The Hazards of Love in its entirety.

How do you make that sound again?

The best an the brightest

Via Talking Points Memo I've been reading Joseph St. Denis's response to congressional inquiries about the shenanigans in A.I.G.'s financial products division. Joseph St. Denis was the chief accountant of the division, and resigned in September 2007 because he had been denied access to the process by which the firm's super credit default swaps were valuated. TPM is all over this story, but here's a snippet from the letter that jumped out at me:

This was the first time Mr. Cassano had expressed criticism of any of my close working relationships with FSD or OAP. As previously noted, during my evaluation with Mi. Cassano in June of 2007 two months earlier, Mr. Cassano had told me that I was "doing a great job," and that I should "work closely with [AIG]." He also volunteered during this meeting in June 2007,which was also attended by William Kolbert, that he had "no desire to be promoted, because it would separate [him] from the money," and that AIG's corporate management was "scared to death" of him'

I'm Montressor, son!

Earlier in the semester my classes read "The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe. It's a class favorite and we've been returning to the story now and again.

Today one of my students sent me a link to Flocabulary's hip-hop version of the story. I believe I may now have to show this to my class. The video is funny but not that great; however, I love how it insinuates Poe murdering Baudelaire.

Gadgets

As I work to come to terms with my gadget problem, I find that I need boundaries but am unable to define them for myself. The difficulty is that the border between gadgets and non-gadgets is a little fuzzy. Which brings me to my question. Are the following examples of gadgets? Please explain your answers.

• stereo
  
• microwave
  
• car
  
• foreman grill
  
• charcoal grill
  
• DVR
  
• trash compactor
  
• toilet
  
• flashlight
  
• smart phone
  
• television

Kansas in the (historical comparisons) news

Also, will Steele beat the Roberts' record for shortest RNC Chairmanship ever? Matt Cooper discovered that the current record holder appears to be Sen. Pat Roberts' (R-KS) dad, C. Wesley Roberts, who was chairman for four months in 1953 before a reporter discovered he'd collected a $10,000 commission on the sale of a hospital the state of Kansas owned. Good times. I wonder if Steele can top it. |TPM|

"some concern"

As I wrote in my Employee Free Choice Act piece today, the business side scored a major -- perhaps decisive -- early win by defining the bill as "card check" and as a matter of depriving workers of a "secret ballot" -- which is a hard, poll-tested spin on one aspect of the bill.

Warren Bufftett's remarks on CNBC this morning, where he came out against the legislation, show how effective that tactic was:

“I think the secret ballot’s pretty important in the country," Buffett said. "I’m against card check to make a perfectly flat statement.”

On the other hand, there's some concern in the ranks of business that labor will offer a compromise discarding the provision it refers to as "majority sign-up," take the equally important binding arbitration and other provisions. By this logic, centrist senators can tell business leaders they took care of their most high-profile complaint, while still giving labor game-changing legislation.

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Let's Go To Church

Guitar driven harmonic gospel, raw and heartfelt. The title track starts things off with an infectuous funky shuffle that stands up with the best gospel grooves out there, but it's a pace that can't be sustained. Only one other song, "Lord I'm Coming Back", brings similar energy.

The rest of the record has the band playing in a soulful jangly gear. Highlight's of this sound include the outros from each side. "I Believe" features the group harmonizing with an organ in a style G. Love bit harder than a Rancho Carne High Toro. "Every Day Will Be Sunday", the record's obligatory celebration of the joy death promises to bring us, brings down the curtain with appropriately elegiac harmonies.

i read sometimes, too

Overall, using the Kindle app for the iPhone has been a positive experience. Here's what I like about it:

I always have my phone

So I always have any books I've loaded into the app. That's not true of the other books I'm reading, and probably wouldn't be true of a full Kindle (were I to buy one (which I won't)).

Reading is surprisingly easy

I though it would be more difficult, but it is very natural and almost as immersive as reading from a physical book... and actually more immersive than reading some awkwardly sized or poorly put together books.

The backlight is also nice, when trying to read in the dark without waking either my wife or my 1-month-old baby.

It's quick, easy, and relatively cheap to get books

I wish the interface were a little clearer, but in general it's got the same ease of use as the iTunes store... making it really easy to spend your money on their product!

It's not all great. And unless they can accommodate all the free books on the internet (as far as I know they can't), they will ultimately lose the market to somebody who can.

Feminism > stupidism

Did Palin's Looks Hurt?

...So at least in this sample, it was Republicans and independents who were internally debating Palin’s suitability for the job. The study suggests that their confidence in her abilities may have decreased the more they focused on her looks – and thus, in feminist terms, objectified her.

Well, as feminists would put it, "no shit, sherlock." Palin enthusiasts held her up as their party's Hillary... but hot! Get it!?

(No, they didn't get it.)

Behold the Coconut!

So I've been researching Web resources for my Comp II students, Web sites offering free, full-text books and periodical articles (I'm interested in finding such sources for all kinds of subjects, but especially literature, literary biographies, and literary analyses). I've been investigating Google Books and Google Scholar, for instance.

Then, I came across this today in the Times. It's about Google's recent settlement with authors and publishers wherein Google will "pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages":

So while there is a large direct-mail effort, a dedicated Web site about the settlement in 36 languages...and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending — about $7 million of a total of $8 million — is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals, with at least one ad in each country. These efforts make this among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.

That Google is in the position of paying for so many print ads “is hilarious — it is the ultimate irony,” said Robert Klonoff, dean of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., and the author of a recent law review article titled “Making Class Actions Work: The Untapped Potential of the Internet.”

So far, more than 200 advertisements have run in more than 70 languages: in highbrow periodicals like The New York Review of Books and The Poetry Review in Britain; in general-interest publications like Parade and USA Today; in obscure foreign trade journals like China Copyright and Svensk Bokhandel; and in newspapers in places like Fiji, Greenland, the Falkland Islands, and the Micronesian island of Niue (the name is roughly translated as Behold the Coconut!), which has one newspaper.

The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world’s entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries.

Under the proposed settlement, reached on Oct. 28 and still subject to court approval, there must be an effort the court finds “reasonable and practicable” to find authors and publishers — especially copyright holders of so-called orphan books, which are still in copyright but long out of print. So the task means placing at least one advertisement in every country in the world.

Send me any links you think I might find useful.

400 Human Sounds

Personalize it to your own tastes and keep kids entertained, make your friends laugh, add effects to your business meetings, clearly communicate your pleasure/displeasure to others and irritate parents.

Users who "have additional sounds" are encouraged to email them to the app's author.

The pension bubble

The Teacher Retirement System of Texas, the seventh-largest public pension fund in the U.S., reports each year that its expected rate of return is 8 percent. Public records show the fund has had an average return of 2.6 percent during the past 10 years.

The nation’s largest public pension fund, California Public Employees’ Retirement System, has been reporting an expected rate of return of 7.75 percent for the past eight years, and 8 percent before that, according to Calpers spokesman Clark McKinley.

Its annual return during the decade from Dec. 31, 1998, to Dec. 31, 2008, has been 3.32 percent, and last year, when markets tanked, it lost 27 percent. |Bloomberg|

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Troubling, he says

In the here and now, the Dow has dropped 52.5 percent since its high of 14,279.96 on Oct. 11, 2007, to its low point of 6,779.62 during intraday trading on Monday. And in taking a similar 1 year-and-five-month period in the late 1920s, it's a case of deja vu.

The rate of decline is mimicking that of the Dow during the Great Depression. Back on Sept. 3, 1929, the Dow hit a high mark of 381.17. And over a similar 1-year-and-four -month period, it fell 54.7 percent to 172.36 on Jan. 2, 1931. "It's very troubling if you have a mirror image," said Phil Dow, market strategist for RBC Dain Rauscher & James. |source|

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Party of "No!"

If you haven’t seen the video by now, it’s easy enough to find. After watching a Bobby Jindal performance featuring a barrage of incomprehensible choices Tuesday night, David Brooks threw his hands up in the air and declared the response, “a disaster for the Republican Party.”

There’s wide agreement on that point, so far as it goes. What set Brooks apart was his insistence that the disaster was not one of style, or even substance, but of politics. Brooks was saying that Jindal erred in making a tax cutting, government hating message the centerpiece of his case.

Which, again, is a fair point. Jindal is the governor of a state that has taken in $130 billion in federal aid following Katrina, so you might think that Brooks was honing in on the hollowness of Jindal’s skinflint posturing.

But, no, Brooks had something else again in mind. The brand is damaged, he was saying. The anti-tax, anti-government brand is all hat and no cattle. A dog that won’t hunt. A well pumped dry.

A disaster for the Republican Party.

Well, I don’t know. The first rule of conservative pundit interpretation is don’t take the advice of conservative pundits. Applied to policy, failing to follow this rule can lead to war, famine, and death. In politics, things are less serious but it remains true that disregarding the rule is highly correlated with consignment to the political wilderness.

As much as I wonder what alternative Brooks had in mind, I know for sure what advice I’d have given Jindal. Focus on the weird religious stuff. Tell ‘em about the exorcisms. America is ready for your testimony, Governor, is what I’d say.

To be completely honest though, I think the tried and true ‘we believe that Americans know better how to spend their money than government does’ is a better message.

Which gets me to this. One of the striking things about Obama’s address and the Republican response was that we seem to have arrived at a point where each party has embraced the framing of the other.

Obama berates Republicans as “The party of ‘No!’” and celebrates Democrats as people who “believe that government isn’t the problem, but can be part of the solution.” Jindal expressly denies that government can solve any problem better than the people, and embraces an argument from generational justice in support of the Republican commitment to stand athwart economic recovery crying “stop!”

It’s big government versus no government, pure and simple.

Much of the online criticism of Jindal’s response has focused on a story he told about a time “during Katrina” when he and Sheriff Harry Lee (“A Democrat!”) took a stand against a bureaucrat and got things done, a story which Jindal apparently embroidered to make it seem as if he played a larger role than he did. The real puzzle, though, lies in the plot itself. Who, after all, are Jindal and Lee but representatives of the government?

The story shows that if you elect the right people, then you can count on government to get things done. Or anyway, that’s what it says to me. To Jindal, and presumably to many Americans, it says that we must elect officials who will say “No!” to the encroachment of government bureaucracy, and thereby enable the people themselves to get things done.

The left says “Party of 'No!'"
The right says “You betcha!”

Contra Brooks, this situation seems to pay Republicans quite a few immediate political dividends. It allows them to establish a clear contrast with the Bush Administration by saying "No!" to the claim that deficits don’t matter. Because they are already framed as a party with an ideological commitment of opposition to everything, Republicans are granted tactical freedom to obstruct anything they choose at very little additional cost. Most importantly, “No” is a big tent, big enough to fit anyone who is put off by any aspect of Obama’s vast agenda.

The emerging picture is of a Republican Party unstained by the mistakes of the Bush Administration and able to dress any and every oppositional impulse in the virtuous cloth of principled opposition to the reckless expansion of government.

Going forward, the political calculation is clear. The economy is in free fall, and there’s a good chance that things will still be bad in 2010 and even in 2012. Rush Limbaugh, who openly declares that he wants the Obama Administration to fail, gets points for being honest. Pure Republican opposition gives Obama and the Democrats ownership of that probably-still-shaky economy, erodes Obama’s coalition by making him less able to satisfy promises to supporters, and lets Republicans score political points whether they succeed or fail at stopping any particular thing.

Not the worst frame in the world. Not a disaster for the Republican Party.

But neither, for all that, is it a disaster for the Democrats. If the Republicans are the party of no, then Democrats can’t be faulted when Republicans rebuff their offers of bipartisan cooperation, no matter how hollow those offers might have turned out to be. More to the point, the change that Obama talks about isn’t something new and scary that voters have never heard of. He’s merely proposing to implement a Democratic agenda that has been in place for years, is well known, and is broadly popular.

Implementing that agenda, however, was always going to require joining the debate about the role of government in society. Looking back at the squandered opportunity that was the Clinton Administration, surely one of the lessons is that Democrats cannot accomplish their policy goals while refusing to defend the ideology under which those policies are justified.

Clinton’s solution to the problem of Republican messaging was to triangulate away from it. In other words, his administration sought to create a message which accepted the premise of Republican talking points while identifying the administration as being in opposition to whatever it was that the Republicans happened to attack. This worked well enough for Clinton, but it hamstrung the party because it reinforced the perception that Democrats had no principles but were mere political opportunists.

Obama’s approach in the present situation is both strikingly different and strikingly conventional. To my eye, we’ve got a straightforward application of the message box. Obama has taken what the Republicans say about themselves and recast it in entirely negative terms while also punching it up to make it much catchier. This creates the implication that the Democrats are the party of yes, which in turn resonates with Obama’s “Yes we can” slogan which, in message box terms, fits into the category of what we say about ourselves.

For my part, I think Obama's approach gives Democrats a their best chance to make progress on core issues like improving access to health care and moving the country toward a sustainable path. Does this mean that Brooks was right after all? Not nearly. The Republican anti-government message has some clear immediate advantages and has, when the debate has been joined directly, had great success in the past. Obama is willing to engage on these terms because he has to, and he has done a good job of preparing the ground, but it's worth remembering that it has been decades since Democrats last gained ground in this fight.

Oh, and speaking of Brooks, I told you the video was easy to find:



And, because this post has gotten unduly substantive, here's Kenny the Page:

That's some catch

Nicholas Beaudrot points to some interesting stuff in Warren Buffet's annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway (PDF). The short short version is that the housing bubble happened first in the mobile home sector, a sector in which Buffet was heavily invested but managed not to lose his shirt. What was his magical formula? He issued loans only after establishing that the borrower had sufficient income to meet the payments.

Smart guy, that Buffet.

Nevertheless, the outlook for 2009 is dim:

[Our] lending operation, though not damaged by the performance of its borrowers, is nevertheless threatened by an element of the credit crisis. Funders that have access to any sort of government guarantee – banks with FDIC-insured deposits, large entities with commercial paper now backed by the Federal Reserve, and others who are using imaginative methods (or lobbying skills) to come under the government’s umbrella – have money costs that are minimal. Conversely, highly-rated companies, such as Berkshire, are experiencing borrowing costs that, in relation to Treasury rates, are at record levels. Moreover, funds are abundant for the government-guaranteed borrower but often scarce for others, no matter how creditworthy they may be.

This unprecedented “spread” in the cost of money makes it unprofitable for any lender who doesn’t enjoy government-guaranteed funds to go up against those with a favored status. Government is determining the “haves” and “have-nots.” That is why companies are rushing to convert to bank holding companies, not a course feasible for Berkshire.

Though Berkshire’s credit is pristine – we are one of only seven AAA corporations in the country – our cost of borrowing is now far higher than competitors with shaky balance sheets but government backing. At the moment, it is much better to be a financial cripple with a government guarantee than a Gibraltar without one. |2009 Buffet Shareholder Letter, p. 12|